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AMERICA AT WORK 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 



THE REAL 

SIBERIA. 

Together with an Account of a 
Dash Through Manchuria. 

With 48 Pages of Illustrations. 

**♦ A FIFTH IMPRESSION HAS ALREADY BEEN 
CALLED FOR. 

"A clever volume."— Standard. 

" The book is one to read, and it is well 
illustrated by reproductions of photographs 
taken by the author himself." — Daily Tele- 
graph. 

"Mr. Fraser has Hfted the veil which hid 
the real Siberia from our eyes." — Black and 
White.^ 

"It is full of information which will come 
as a surprise to the average English reader." — 
Pall Mall Gazette. 

Cassell & Company, Limited, London ; 
Paris, New York and Melbourne. 




THE "FLAT-IRON" 
NEARING COMPLETION. 



y^MERICA 
AT WORK 



BY / 

JOHN FOSTER FRASER 

Author of 
''The Real Siberia,'' etc. 



WITH THIRTY-EIGHT FULL-PACE 
PLATES FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 



CASSELL AND COMPANY. LIMITED 
LONDON. PARIS. NEW YORK 
AND MELBOURNE. MCMIII 
All Rights Reserved 



1 Zl 



Firal Edition, March, 1903. 
Reprinted, May, 190S. 



CONTENTS. 



PAOK 

Foreword 1 

CHAPTER L 
The Newest New York 6 



CHAPTER II. 
The Work in Department Stores . . . . 17 

CHAPTER III. 
Rapid Transit in New York ..... 29 

CHAPTER IV. 
How Railway Engines are Built .... 39 

CHAPTER V. 
Scenes in Pittsburg ....... 50 

CHAPTER VI. 
Some Ways they have in Washington ... 64 

CHAPTER VII. 
Commercial Training in New York . . . 76 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Some Phases of Commercial Life .... 88 

CHAPTER IX. 
The American Farmer ...... 98 



CHAPTER X. 
Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations ill 



vi CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER XI. PAGE 

Railways and Railway Travelling . . .124 

CHAPTER XII. 
Chicago 138 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Hoa Killing and Packing in Chicago . . .152 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Methods op Business in Chicago .... 164 

CHAPTER XV. 
Niagara in Harness 177 

CHAPTER XVI. 

The American Working Man 189 

CHAPTER XVIL 
Manufacture of Boots and Shoes . . . .199 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
Coal Mining , 212 

CHAPTER XIX. 
Electrical Work 223 

CHAPTER XX. 
The Woollen Industry 233 

CHAPTER XXI. 
The Cotton Industry 245 

CHAPTER XXII. 
Some General Conclusions 257 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

•o* Facing 

page 

The "Flat-Iron" Hearing Completion . Frontispiece 

The Beginning of the "Flat-Iron" .... 6 

A Near View op the "Flat-Iron" . . . . . 10 

The "Flat-Iron" in Construction 14 

Assembling op Parts in Erecting Shop at Baldwin's. 40 
Hydraulic Riveting Machines at Baldwin's . .42 

The Latest American Freight Engine .... 48 

The Homestead Works, near Pittsburg .... 56 

The Hoover and Mason Grab 62 

University op Pennsylvania at Philadelphia . . 76 

A Philadelphian Textile School 78 

Technical Instruction in Philadelphia .... 80 

Scientific Class 82 

Designing Class at an Art School 84 

Judging a Shorthorn at Iowa Agricultural College 112 
Instruction in Judging Cotswold Sheep at the Wis- 
consin College 114 

Students Stock- judging at as Agricultural College 116 

Crossing Wheat at an Agricultural College . . 120 

A Typical Pullman Car 124 



viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Facing 
fKige 

Obskrvation Cab on the Pennsylvania Line . .128 

An American Private Railroad Car .... 132 

The "Pennsylvania Special" (1902) 136 

The Generators which Drive the Elevated Railway 

in Chicago 140 

A Corner op Chicago's Slums 144 

Perpetual Ladder Delivering Goods in Chicago. . 148 

Fastening Pigs to the Wheel 152 

Scalding the Pigs. Throat Cutting . . . .154 

Felling Cattle. Stunned Cattle 156 

Removing Hides 158 

Preparing Pork for the Market . . . . .160 
Division op Labour in Plucking Fowls . . . .162 
In the Lasting Room op an American Shoe Factory . 204 
In the Stitching Room op an American Boot Factory 208 
Building Transformers at the Westinqhouse Works. 224 
Winding Department at the Westinghouse Works . 226 
Huge Generator Field at the Westinghouse Works 228 
Draughting Department, Westinghouse Works . . 230 
A Colossal Westinghouse Rotary Field Generator . 232 



AMERICA AT WORK. 



FOREWORD. 

I HAVE written this book, not because I wish to 
laud the United States at the expense of Great 
Britain, but because, having travelled much in 
many lands and having often had my patriotism 
stung by the contemptuous way in which foreigners 
speak of British industries, I desire British workers 
to get level with the industrial times. I believe that 
while British manufacturers have much to teach the 
world, there is much for them to learn, particularly 
from America. 

For many years I have taken interest in methods 
of work in the two countries. In 1902 I visited 
the United States as the representative of " The 
Yorkshire Post " for the purpose of investigating, 
at first hand, into the way great industrial concerns 
are managed. It was not as an expert in any 
business that I went, except that of a trained 
journalist, who, throwing aside details, endeavours 
to get a quick, ready, and, I daresay, rough idea of 
essentials. It was towards the essentials of indus- 
trial success, the mainsprings, as it were, that have 
lifted America to its present position, that I, there- 
fore, directed my eyes. 

B 



2 AMERICA AT WORK. 

One thing I can say — to meet the criticisms 
which I anticipate will be levelled against this book 
— I was absolutely unbiassed. It was a difficult 
condition of mind to maintain. It was difficult, 
because it is impossible to generalise about America: 
it is too vast, its population is too complex, the con- 
ditions of labour are so varied in different States. 
There was the temptation to take up one side or 
another, to see some things which filled me with 
enthusiasm and promptly declare: "It is in the 
United States you find all that is best," or to see 
something vulgar and barbarous, and cry out: 
" Heaven save England from copying the Yankees 
in that direction! " 

To have written in praise of all things I saw 
would have been to gain the plaudits of Americans 
— who are ever willing to recognise appreciation — 
but to have been regarded scoffingly by my own 
countrymen as one who mistook bluster for business 
capacity. To have written in wholesale condemna- 
tion would have brought upon me, a gor-darned 
Britisher, the abuse of Americans — who are ever 
eager to resent criticism — though a considerable 
section of my own countrymen would have patted 
me on the shoulder for doing a good service in show- 
ing up the bumptious, unscrupulous ways of the 
land where they make the wooden nutmegs. In 
this volume, however, I try to do neither one thing 
nor the other: what I saw to admire I admired 
unstintedly; what I saw to condemn I condemned 
unequivocally. 

That, I thought, was the fairest way, especially 



FOREWORD. Z 

as I was writing for the British public, and anxious 
they should imitate what was good in American 
industrial life, but avoid what was bad. 

But there is a lot of human nature in both the 
British and American people. Praise is accepted 
as simple justice; criticism is looked upon as an 
impertinence. In subsequent pages there will be 
found chapters dealing with American boot-making, 
and with the state of Chicago. When the chapter 
on boot-making appeared in " The Yorkshire Post," 
the American newspapers said : *' Here is a sensible 
man with his wits awake, and who knows what he 
is writing about." The English boot manufacturers 
were indignant at my having said they were tod- 
dling at the tail of American manufacturers, and 
they sneered at American foot-wear as rather less 
durable than bro^v^n paper. I wrote on Chicago. 
" Oh! " exclaimed the Briton, " I liked that article, 
showing what a sink of iniquity the place is." 
Men, indeed, who knew Chicago better than I pretend 
to do wrote me saying my pen was far too mild. The 
Chicago newspapers, however, poured verbal vitriol 
over me as one more of those hide-bound Britishers 
who could see no good in any country but their 
own! 

Personally I would not care to live in America, 
because there is such a lack of repose, because — 
and I am not forgetting charming exceptions — the 
general conversation among men is always on one 
subject — money-making, and because there is a rush 
and a scurry, living merely to work, instead of work- 
ing to get some of the beauty out of life, that often 



4 AMEEICA AT WORK. 

suggested the hard race was not really worth the 
prize. 

But in this book I have carefully avoided con- 
sidering America at work from personal proclivi- 
ties. I treat it as a nation in business, a rival 
in commerce, and with no sentiment in the rivalry. 
The day has gone by when the British manu- 
facturer can dismiss the competition of the American 
manufacturer with a sneer. If, however, he con- 
cludes that the stress, the relentless strain, the un- 
ceasing grind, which is a characteristic of American 
industry, is not repaid by the material prosperity it 
brings, he acknowledges that America is to be 
allowed to give Great Britain the go-by. It avails 
nothing to talk about the heartlessness of employers, 
to give strings of instances of how the sap of life is 
drained from a man before he has reached forty 
years of age, to repudiate the American tendency of 
making the workers not artisans, but machines. All 
this may be perfectly true. The real issue is this : 
Here is America, never mind by what means, but 
certainly, equipping herself to oust Great Britain 
from its place as a manufacturing nation ; and what 
do the manufacturers of Great Britain propose 
in order that their own country may retain her 
position ? 

We have taught the United States many things. 
Indeed, the best of all they have has been learnt 
from us. But whilst we have been resting on our 
oars they have been swirling ahead. 

I gathered many things in the course of my in- 
vestigations. One of the principal facts was that, 



FOREWORD. 6 

man for man, the British workman is the superior 
of the American. The weak link was the capability 
of the emploj^ers, the administration of great con- 
cerns. In adaptiveness, in resource, in ingenuity, 
in whole-souled keenness to succeed, the average 
American manufacturer is by far the superior of his 
British compeer. 

If he would but rouse himself, the British manu- 
facturer could soon alter this state of affairs ; and it 
is for this reason I respectfully invite him to learn 
something from " America at Work." 

JOHN FOSTER FRASER. 

The Authors^ Clnh, London, S.W. 
March, 1903. 



CHAPTER L 

THE NEWEST NEW YORK. 

TWICE a day, for seven days in the summer of 
1902, I stood where Broadway and Fifth 
Avenue make a St. Andrew's cross of them- 
selves, and got a kink in the back of my neck looking 
towards the top of " the most wonderful building I 
guess there is on this earth, sir." 

The scaffolding had just been taken down, and 
the people of New York, who are apt at similes, 
dubbed it the Flatiron. That is its shape. The 
ship's prow of a front is no width at all. The length, 
however, is 190 feet; the breadth at the back, in 
Twenty-second Street, is just 86 feet 8 inches, and 
the height soars cloudwards for 307 feet. 

It is the latest thing in sky-scrapers. 

New York is proud of it. The illustrated papers 
give two-page illustrations of it — for, however re- 
duced, it would be impossible to get it all on one 
page — and an enterprising stationer has produced a 
three-folded photograph picture post-card of it, so 
that not one of the twenty storeys be left out. It is 
the first thing a New Yorker takes you to see. 

It is not the tallest building in New York ; but 
it is the most slender, the most aquiline. " It is 
the sharpest thing any architect ever perpetrated," 
writes an American. 



THE NEWEST NEW YORK. 7 

You stand in front of it and look up at it, so 
high and so fragile, with walls so thin and legs so 
spindle-like, and you say it only needs the puff of a 
blizzard to bring the thing down like a pack of 
cards. 

But then you are a European with antiquated 
notions, and the Flatiron is the latest fad in steel 
skeleton buildings. 

Now it does a Londoner good to go to New York, 
if only to stop his grumbling because Whitehall 
is up and half the Strand is down, and London 
generally'' looks as though it had been bombarded. 

New York is always being pulled down and 
ripped up. Londoners hope the day will soon come 
when the building of hotels and pavement laying 
will be finished. If New York were not half sky- 
scrapers and half scrap-heap of old sky-scrapers, New 
Yorkers would feel their business enterprise had been 
paralysed. An Englishman builds for eternity. An 
American builds for ten years. He smiles at a man 
who thinks he knows what will be wanted twelve 
years hence. 

New York is the greatest mining camp on earth. 
Tw^enty-four miles of its busiest streets are being 
blasted into subways for an electric railway. You 
can take a five cent, trolley ride, and above the harsh 
clang of the bolls and the roar of the overhead rail- 
roads you hear the teeth of the drill biting into the 
rock on which New York is built. A thunder clap 
of dynamite blows loose a boulder, and looking over 
the side of the car, which tears without nervousness 
over a ramshackle, propped and wedged temporary 



8 AMERICA AT WORK. 

way, you see the mining in full work. It is not a 
pretty sight, but the men toil strenuously. Many of 
them get killed. That does not signify. The rest 
work on as though they had shares in the company. 

In England thoroughfares would be closed to 
traffic if there was one quarter the delving. But I 
saw no street closed in New York. The electric 
cars tore along with the fury of torpedoes, just as 
usual. In places were heaps of dSris. Half a 
street was screened with ugly boards. You felt 
you were in chaos. Yet there was no chaos, and 
through dust and noise, shrieking of trains, and 
clanging of gongs, chattering of drills, and blast- 
ing of rock, you bounded on your way unhalting. 

New York is a vortex of rebuilding. A con- 
tractor told me ten years is the life of a buildijig 
in New York. In ten j^ears, of course, it has not 
crumbled or bulged, nor does it look different from 
what it did when first built. But it has become 
antiquated. It is only twelve storeys, a mere barn 
in height, and the proper height now is anything 
from twent}'' to thirty storeys. Its lifts, elevators, 
only go three times as fast as they do in England. 
Besides, there are not enough of them, and they stop 
at every floor. What is wanted is a system of many 
elevators to provide for local traffic, and express 
elevators that do not stop lower than the eighteenth 
floor. 

I had pointed out to me a good hotel, built only 
eight years before, with what are called all the most 
modern improvements. It was being pulled down 
60 that a building twice as high might be erected. 



THE NEWEST NEW YORK. 9 

** You British," said a man to me, " use a thing 
till it becomes useless. We Americans use a thing 
only till we get something better. It doesn't matter 
how good it is or how much it cost, we just scrap it 
when it is out of date." 

Building in New York has ceased to be a thing 
for architects and masons; it has become a thing 
for engineers and rivetters. The stone used is only 
a clothing to the skeleton of steel. 

The rage for steel frame sky-scrapers has struck 
New York as the measles strikes a school of young- 
sters. Not so long ago American architects agreed 
that to put up a building higher than sixteen 
storeys was to step into the region of danger. But 
that is ancient history. Seven years later I smoked 
a cigar by a window on the twenty-ninth 
storey of the Park Row building, absolutely the 
tallest block of offices in the world. Broadway, far 
below, was but a strip of ribbon, and people were 
like ants. The vast statue of Liberty guarding 
New York harbour was reduced to the proportions 
of an ordinary-sized woman. The fine Cunard 
liner Campania, on which I crossed the Atlantic 
less than a week before, was the size of a sixpenny 
toy boat. 

The offices on the top storeys of the Park Row 
Building never have any of the city dust; and flies 
— a plague in summer — never reach as high. 

It is not alone eagerness to go half-a-dozen 
better than anybody else that has produced the 
present rivalry in erecting mammoth sky-scrapers. 
New York is on a long island of rock. As the 



10 AMERICA AT WORK. 

busiest part of the town is the lower and narrower 
end, as every inch is occupied, as New York is 
wresting from London to itself the centre of the 
world's mone}'' market, and as it cannot expand 
outwards, it has to grow upwards. The concentra- 
tion of vast commercial interests has caused an 
enormous appreciation of land values. In the Wall 
Street neighbourhood ground costs about £60 ($300) 
a square foot. 

To build on the English plan, with huge founda- 
tions, stout masonry, and only some five storeys 
high would mean enormous rents, and the pushing 
of smaller firms " up town " out of the business 
area. 

Americans must be ** right there," within five 
minutes of everywhere. Accordingly house builders 
are now engineers, running up structures of little 
foundation, no width, no waste of space, but enor- 
mously high, and providing a town of offices under 
one roof. Take the Flatiron. On each of its twenty 
storej^s are seventeen offices. Allowing an average 
of five persons to an office you get a population of 
1,700 business people. 

The rebuilding of New York is not individual 
enterprise. There are companies that have taken 
the work in hand. The Standard Oil Trust have 
several fingers in, and they propose joining blocks 
of buildings worth £11,000,000 by an arcade six 
hundred feet long. Tlie principal building firms are 
the Edgar-Thompson Company and the Fuller Con- 
struction Company, with capitals of multi-millions. 
The way a company works is on this plan: It fixes 



THE NEWEST NEW YORK. 11 

its eyes on a building of eight, or ten, or twelve 
storeys in a good business district. The owners are 
approached, and where they have been reaping 
3 or 4 per cent from their property they are promised 
6 or 7 if they hand it over to the construction com- 
pany, with the option of buying the new building at 
a certain price. They agree. Down comes the ten- 
storey building, and up goes one of twenty or more 
storeys. Then a company is started to buy the 
building from the construction company, and the 
construction company, having " made a good thing," 
plunges into fresh operations. 

I went over four or five of these typical American 
buildings, with no style of architecture about them 
except the sky-scraper style. 

They are not beautiful. You need not tell the 
American that. If you do he will retort : " They 
were not put up to look pretty. They were put up 
to make money. They are doing what they were put 
up for. Guess you've got no fault to find with 
that!" 

" Push! " is the motto of all engaged in building 
sky-scrapers. 

I never saw a man dawdle. There seemed honest 
zest in everyone. I stood by the hour watching and 
noting the haste. Most of the workers were men 
of about thirty years. They were spry and elastic, 
and their wits were on the dance. If there was a 
check, a man would halt, squirt tobacco juice 
between his teeth at the adjoining wall, and say: 
*' Guess we'd better do it the other way." In an 
instant a fresh start was made. 



12 AMERICA AT WORK. 

The rock on which New York stands has a billowy 
surface. In places the rock is on top, and in others 
it lies under a cap of quicksand and hard pan. 
First, caisson foundations are put in, huge steel tuns, 
to get a flat-footed bottom in which the steel columns 
that will bear the strain of the framework can be 
fixed in concrete. When the rock is near the surface 
work begins right away. If, however, there is 
quicksand to be got through, there is delay. The 
excavating is done in air-tight chambers, and when 
bottom is reached concrete is laid. It hardens in 
twenty-four hours, and then the caisson can be fixed. 
Forty feet of quicksand and twelve feet of hard 
pan have been cut through in seven days. 

To put up a ten storey building in a year was 
thought not long ago excellent progress. Not to be 
able to put up a twenty storey building in six 
months is now thought evidence of slackness. To 
climb two storeys a week is the usual progress. 

There is no waiting until the skeleton is com- 
plete before covering it with stone or brick. As 
soon as the engineers are a storey ahead the masons 
and bricklayers come along. 

In the finest buildings the bottom storey has 
often a shell of granite or marble, and the upper 
storeys local white stone. Should there be a delay 
with the granite or marble, that does not mean delay 
with the encasing higher up. Each storey bears 
its own weight of stone and brickwork. So you 
frequently see stone encasing the fifteenth and 
sixteenth storeys, the building complete, and the 
windows in, while the twelfth, thirteenth, and four- 



THE NEWEST NEW YORK. 13 

teenth storeys are nothing more than open iron work. 
To look at a mighty building half completed, and 
that half the top-half, brings rather a jerk into the 
breath. 

Only at first do you think flimsiness must mean 
weakness. The scheme of distribution of weight is 
scientific and mathematical. Each column is de- 
signed to bear a specific load, sometimes as much as 
three million pounds, and these columns have box- 
shaped flanges at each storey to bear the weight of the 
masonry. All through are steel braces to get lateral 
stiffness. The steel work is protected by fire-proof 
bricks, so that, in the event of a conflagration, the 
steel may not warp. The floors are usually terra- 
cotta arches, laid in cement, and covered with cinder 
concrete. The idea is to keep a fire confined to the 
storey in which it originates. 

In several of the buildings I visited the lower 
floors were ready for occupancy, except for some 
plastering, long before even the steel skeleton 
was completed. Bricklayers trod on the heels of 
engineers ; carpenters and plumbers followed brick- 
layers, and by the time the last bolt was being driven 
on the twentieth storey the ofiice furniture was being 
moved into the first. The rent is calculated by the 
square foot of ofiice room. In the Wall Street dis- 
trict you will pay £1 per month per square foot 
on the ground floor. The average cost, however, for 
an ordinary three-roomed office of medium size about 
the centre of the building is £15 a month. 

The objection that springs into the mind of the 
Briton is that, as British towns are often built on 



14 AMERICA AT WORK. 

clay, tlie steel frame could have no certain hold as 
when on rock. 

The answer is, that in Chicago some of the 
loftiest blocks " float," as it is called, on clay. 
There is delving for twenty or thirty feet, and by 
compressed air the water is kept back. Then a 
concrete bed is laid. On this the caissons are put 
as though it were rock, and they are embedded in 
concrete. The weight of a twenty storey building 
will only sink the concrete into the bed of clay a 
couple of inches. 

The highest block in the world, the Park Eow 
Building, 382 feet, has thirty storeys, and thirty- 
two if the couple of rooms in the cupola are counted. 
It has a frontage of 103 feet, so that it is nearly 
four times as high as it is wide. The skeleton alone 
contains 9,000 tons of steel. Yet it does not stand on 
rock. It rests on 3,500 spruce trees with their bark 
on, twenty-five feet long and twelve inches in dia- 
meter, driven twenty-four feet into sand, and the 
remaining one foot flushed level with concrete. 

It is in buildings like these that New York 
commerce throbs. Here men, coatless and vestless, 
and with their sleeves rolled up — men are kept cool 
in blistering summer with a moving electric fan 
— smoke green cigars. There is a movable tele- 
phone at their left elbow, and a typewriter on their 
right hand. They are mostly young men, tall, well 
built, and with nervous eagerness in every line of 
their clear-skinned faces. They drink iced water. 
Of course they drink other things, but the American 
business man is really a water-drinking person : and 
he hustles. 




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THE NEWEST NEW YORK. 15 

Still, there is often more hustle than haste. I 
have seen a man stand cursing for thirty seconds 
at the non-coming of an elevator to take him to 
the floor below, when he could run down in fifteen 
seconds. 

There are seven thousand elevators in New York, 
and they carry more than a million passengers a day. 
They are fast — six times as fast as English lifts. 
When I inspected the Park Row Building an apology 
was made to me that they were not the swiftest in 
New York. 

But picture this. You go into a heavily marbled 
hall, full of men in lounge suits and straw hats stuck 
on the back of their heads. In the centre is a half 
moon of caged doors. Over them you see notices — 
" Local," " Express to thirteenth," and the like. 
There are two electric lamps above each door, and 
they alternately light up, showing the words " Up," 
or *' Down." Over these again is a dial, and the dial 
is curving to and fro. You give one glance, and 
j^'ou understand that number eight elevator is at the 
seventeenth storey, and that it is coming down. In 
case you are too busy to look you can hear a man, 
with a twang like a broken piano string, shouting 
*' Local car on the right just coming down; express 
in the centre, no stop till the thirteenth floor ; express 
to the twentieth floor on the left, then stop all floors ; 
local between the thirteenth and twentieth floor; 
right there, sir! " 

And all the time those eight cage doors are alter- 
nately clattering open, and they throw out crowds of 
men, anH other men jump in and are shot as from a 
cannon skvwards. 



16 AMERICA AT WORK. 

On each floor are the twin electric lamps, " Up," 
and *' Down," and over each elevator swings the 
hand on the dial. You know there, just as well as 
on the ground floor, where all the cars are, and you 
signal the nearest approaching car by pressing a 
button. An elevator will drop from the twenty- 
eighth storey to the floor with no halt unless there 
is a signal to stop. The descent makes you feel the 
bottom has fallen out of the world. 

The constant rising and dropping affects the 
elevator men. They generally have to cease the work 
because of shattered nerves ; that is, if they do not 
die suddenlv from heart disease. 



B 



CHAPTER II. 

THE WORK IN DEPARTMENT STORES. 

EING the husband of an American wife, it is 
my duty, when in my London suburban home, 
to listen about twice a week to little disquisi- 
tions on the slowness of English shopkeepers. 

What always strikes an American woman as 
curious is that she cannot walk into a big drapery 
establishment in London with the intention of look- 
ing round without somebody coming up and wanting 
to know her desires in the purchasing line. In 
America a woman goes into a shop, saunters round, 
comes out again without buying, and though there 
be a hundred sales-people, nobody offers to sell her 
anything. 

Another thing that irritates an American woman 
when shopping in England is to be kept waiting while 
all the packages unfolded for the preceding customer 
are re-wrapped, tied, and put on their respective 
shelves. Also, if she is looking at silk and does not 
fancy the first or the second sample shown her, that 
she must wait till the shop girl has put away the first 
two samples before bringing out more. Further, 
when a shop has not the article the American woman 
wants, that the shop girl persists in showing her 
things she does not want, and not infrequently shows 
testiness if the visitor walks out without getting any- 



18 AMERICA AT WORK. 

thing. In America the shop girl says she hasn't got 
the thing, and the matter ends. 

America is the home of great department stores, 
or dry goods stores, as they are called, and the 
management of them reaches to the level of a science. 
The first was created in Philadelphia in 1876. 
In that year an exhibition wsis held, and alj^ sorts 
of articles were sold. It struck a 3^oung man that a 
shop run on the same lines might be profitable. lie 
tried it, and that was the start of the great depart- 
ment stores of John Wanamaker of Philadelphia and 
New York. 

Fortunes of millions have been made out of 
those stores. But there came rivals. There is the 
great firm of Siegel Cooper Company, which is " slap 
bang up to date." In Chicago is the colossal busi- 
ness of Marshall Field. There are others, prepared 
to sell you anything from a rhinoceros to a ribbon. 
The whole establishment of our own " Universal Pro- 
vider " of Westbourne Grove could be put in the 
corner of one department. 

I spent several days investigating the methods 
of work at the two most representative stores : Wana- 
maker's, which holds the better-class business, and 
Siegel Cooper's, which may be said to cater for the 
million. In regard to prices they were just about a 
third dearer than in England, and although there 
was more catering to the fancy of the moment, more 
daintiness in design, more endeavour to make all 
articles smart, neat, and inviting, the quality was 
decidedly below the British standard. 

There seems to be little to choose between the 



THE WORK IN DEPARTMENT STORES. 19 

shopiDan of New York and London. The American 
shop girl, however, is far ahead of her English 
cousin. She is possibly not so ladylike and polite ; 
but she is a bundle of intelligent vivacity. She is 
neither anasmic nor languid. She treats customers 
with a familiarity that would be met with rebuke 
in an English shop ; but she means no impertinence 
nor cheekiness. You want to buy, she wants to sell ; 
and you are equal. 

There are 3,500 employees at Wanamaker's place 
in Broadway. In summer the hours are from eight 
till five, with a half-holiday on Saturday. In winter 
the hours are from eight to six, with no half-holiday 
at all. The lowest wage for a girl at the " notions " 
counter — needles, hairpins, studs, odds and ends — 
is 29s. ($7) a week. A good saleswoman of experi- 
ence will get £3 ($15). The men, the "counter- 
jumpers," average 50s. or £3 a week. This is above 
the English standard, but after working out calcula- 
tions based on the increased cost of living, I am 
convinced the American shop worker is, in the end, 
no better off financially than the English. 

Where the American is better off is that he and 
she have more wholesome food and plenty of it. 
The compeer of the girl whom you see in a London 
A.B.C. place making a lunch of a cup of tea and a 
piece of cake for fourpence you will see in one of 
Child's many restaurants in New York having a 
" quick lunch " of melon, soup, roast beef, and an 
ice cream for two shillings. That " quick lunch " 
is a side-light on American desires. But it never 
is quick. I have much experience of hotels and 



20 AMERICA AT WORK. 

restaurants in different parts of the world, but — 
strange contrast to most things — the waiting in 
American hotels and restaurants is slow to positive 
weariness. 

When a schoolgirl goes into a New York depart- 
ment store she has not to blunder her way into a 
knowledge of her duties. She soon fits herself to 
her work, for she has the faculty of the French girl 
in adaptability. New-comers go to the department 
school, where experienced hands show them how to 
make out bills, give them hints how to talk to a 
customer, how, in an agreeable way, to call attention 
to the special advantages of an article — how, in a 
word, to make selling an art. 

Though there are fifty businesses carried on 
beneath one roof at Wanamaker's, and all under 
one supreme control, each department is managed 
separately by a man called the buyer. He is in 
command. He decides what shall be bought, at 
what price it shall be sold, and what is the proper 
time to make big reductions to clear off stock. A 
certain proportion of the rent, of the lighting and 
heating expenses, and up-keep is debited to his de- 
partment, and he must make his department profit- 
able, as though it were a private business on the 
other side of Broadway. 

There is a special department of ** contingent 
girls," numbering about sixty. They are the 
brightest, keenest, cute-est girls in the place. They 
are prepared to sell anything, from window-soiled 
gloves to grand pianos. The business in various 
departments fluctuates. Let a hot wave strike New 



THE WORK IN DEPARTMENT STORES. 21 

York, and ladies pant for muslin gowns. Let there 
be damp and wretched weather, and there is a de- 
mand for mackintoshes. The managers of American 
department stores calculate that for some reason or 
another, often unexplainable, there is a rush of some 
sort each day in one particular department. Instead, 
however, of keeping a big staff to deal with the rush 
in one department whenever it comes, while another 
department is comparatively slack, the idea is to 
keep a minimum staff, and to use the contingent girls 
wherever the rush happens to be. 

One girl I talked to was selling pictures. The 
previous day she sold washable ties: the day be- 
fore that she was at the magazine stall: the day 
before that in the underwear department. Experi- 
ence has taught Wanamaker that his staff of sixty 
expert contingent girls, who can be called upon at any 
moment, is the best plan to avoid customers being 
kept waiting. The cost of the contingent girls is 
divided between the various departments. 

The arrangement of buying and paying is differ- 
ent from the English plan. Suppose a lady buys four 
yards of silk. A man measures it, cuts it, makes 
out a bill, receives the money. At a desk sits a girL 
That girl sees that the length is as stated on the bilL 
She wraps the money in the bill, sticks them both 
into a pneumatic carrier, and fires the carrier down 
a tube. There are dozens of these tubes all over the 
building, but they are all emptied into one fair- 
sized room in the basement. It is not unlike a tele- 
phone connecting room. Before every seven or eight 
pneumatic instruments sits a girl,, who receives 



22 AMERICA AT WORK. 

the carriers as they come thumping upon the counter. 
She opens the carrier, tears the duplicate check 
number from the bottom of the bill, and files it, 
wraps the change in the bill, returns it to the carrier, 
and fires the carrier back through the tube. Mean- 
while the man who sold the silk is attending to 
another customer, and the girl at the desk is wrap- 
ping the silk. Thus there is a minimum of delay. 

When I was in the receiver room there often came 
down a bill with no money at all. This would be in 
regard to goods bought by some one who said she 
had an account with Wanamaker's. The girl threw 
the bill on a long table behind her, where were rows 
of ledgers. A dark, sallow man was patrolling this 
table, lifting the bills, glancing at them, muttering 
"all right," and throwing them back. He knew the 
names of those who had accounts; if there was a 
doubtful name he had the books to refer to. But 
though he looked at a hundred bills during the 
quarter of an hour I was there, he never once 
referred to a ledger. The girl tore off the duplicate, 
stamped the bill, and sent it back. 

Suppose a lady has a number of purchases to 
make in various departments, and does not wish to 
pay a lot of small bills or carry parcels about with 
her. She states at the first counter that she intends 
to visit other departments. She is supplied with a 
little numbered coupon book, red-leaved, such as you 
receive from tourist agencies. At each counter her 
purchases are written on a coupon, which is torn out, 
and the amount is written on the back of the book, 
so that she herself keeps a check. This is done at 



THE WORK IN DEPARTMENT STORES. 23 

every counter. At the end of her tour she goes by 
the elevator to the ground floor, and there finds all 
her purchases neatly wrapped up ready for her to 
take away when she has paid. 

Great haste is made in packing goods accom- 
panied by a red slip, for that means the purchaser 
may be coming at any moment. If a purchaser 
declares, however, she does not intend to carry the 
things, but will pay on delivery, she is given a book 
with green coupons, and those are a signal to the 
packers that there is no immediate hurry. The 
C.O.D. plan (collect on delivery) is much more in 
vogue in America than in England. This is par- 
ticularly so in departments for ladies' wear. 

An American woman, remember, stands no non- 
sense from a shopkeeper. She is not going to be 
bamboozled into having what she does not want, and 
when she has ordered a thing she is not going to 
have it if, on second thoughts, she does not fancy it. 

So when the messenger turns up with a parcel — 
never leaving it without" being paid, and even taking 
it away again if proper change cannot be procured 
— there is a frequent delay while the lady tries on. 
When all is satisfactory and the money paid, the 
lady may change her mind. This has led to an 
enormous transfer business — people getting tired of 
what they have bought, bringing things back and 
wanting something else, or even their money re- 
turned. The American woman being more nervously 
variable in her moods than her English cousin, is 
inclined to be hoity-toity, and if the manager of a 
store does not let her do as she likes — well, there 



24 AMERICA AT WORK. 

are other stores in New York! So rather than lose 
a customer by refusing to take back something pur- 
chased a fortnight before, he smilingly lets her have 
her own way. 

Knowing her power, the American woman goes 
through the stores its master. She has to be con- 
ciliated. Managers know there is nothing to be 
gained by trying to force a sale, which, done in- 
judiciously, will put her in an ungracious temper, 
and she will buy nothing. Let her roam at her 
free will, and it is a poorly-arranged store that does 
not display many a thing she is likely to be envious 
to possess. 

The Kew York woman has just as great a craze 
for spending dollars as her husband has for making 
them. If she has no dollars, that does not deprive 
her of the pleasure of shopping. She will walk into 
a big store, look over a dozen gowns, and try on 
several before deciding. Then she will get a C.O.D. 
card, and visiting other departments will buy a hat, 
rich underwear, and a parasol. She will give a fine 
order. When the goods are delivered at the address 
she mentioned, it is found there is no such person as 
Mrs. Walker. True, she has put the store to a lot 
of trouble. Yet think of the morning of womanly 
delight she has had in her shopping! 

But the *' greatest store on earth, sir," is the 
caravanserie of Siegel Cooper Company, on Sixth 
Avenue. It is an enormous place, with a front as 
gay as the Alhambra in Leicester Square, and the 
noise inside is that of the Crystal Palace on a Bank 
Holidav afternoon. 



THE WORK IN DEPARTMENT STORES. 25 

Compared with it Wanamaker's is '* a back 
number." On the lower floor, crowded with perspir- 
ing women all fanning themselves — there is a " help 
yourself " stack of fans at the door — is a fountain, 
and in the middle is a statue of a liberty goddess, 
all gilt. 

" Yes, sir ; there is $18,000 worth of gilt leaf on 
that statue," said my guide. 

That guide was a young American, long and 
wiry, with a hatchet face and eyes like a ferret's, and 
his hair was parted in the middle. He chewed, he 
was in his shirt sleeves, and he kept his hands in 
his pockets. The management did well in selecting 
him to show round an undemonstrative, mild-eyed 
British person like myself. He was breezy and talk- 
ative, thought there was no other country on the earth 
besides America, and said so. He was certain there 
was no store on earth bigger'n Siegel Cooper's, and 
said that. 

When he had been talking at me for two hours, 
and we at last got to the iced-soda counter, where 
two hundred white-flounced girls were drinking 
chilled concoctions, from lemon phosphates to ping- 
pong punch, I said to him, " That is the seventeenth 
thing you have told me is the finest in the world." 

He smiled and answered, " Well, sir, we talk like 
that in this country; but I guess it is the finest, 
anywaj^ ! " 

There are many elevators at Siegel Cooper's. But 
elevators are a little out of date at this biggest-in- 
the- world dry goods store. From floor to floor there 
are wide moving staircases. You step on a little 



26 AMERICA AT WORK. 

platform, and in a couple of yards, when the ascent 
commences, stairs automatically form, and you 
stand there until you are landed on the floor above. 
The moving staircase at Earl's Court Exhibition is 
a pimy toy in comparison. 

" Now tell me something wonderful — but ac- 
curate," I casually observed to my young Am^erican. 

" There is no need to blow, sir. This is the 
biggest concern there ever was. Why, sir, do you 
know that nearly 125,000,000 feet of twine is needed 
every year to wrap up goods ? If all the wrapping 
paper were spread out on a flat surface it would cover 
more than 40,000,000 square feet ! We use up 400 
gallons of ink a year, and 45,000 steel pens. Over 
300,000 sales books are required each year, and in 
our grocery department more than 90,000 bags are 
used a week! " 

He talked in a sharp, staccato fashion for nearly 
three hours. He scintillated statistics. He knew 
that 150,000 people visited the store daily — except 
when there were 250,000. 

He called the place " a temple of commerce " and 
*' a city in itself." 

He directed my attention to the searchlight on 
the tower with seven million candle-power. He 
showed me the U.S. Post Office right on the premises, 
and the Siegel Cooper Bank that pays 4 per cent. 
He showed me the telegraph and telephone stations 
where messages " may be flashed to all parts of the 
earth." 

We went from floor to floor, and every part was 
clamorous with buying and selling. My friend 



THE WORK IN DEPARTMENT STORES. 27 

assured me that every throb, every pulsation of this 
great business was swiftly responsive to the needs of 
the season and the personal wants of the multitudes 
of shoppers ! There was a lot of tall talk like this. 

And yet, winnowing the chatter about " master 
minds " and " modern w^onders," there was behind it 
all the great fact that here was a throng of many 
thousands of people shopping on an August after- 
noon, and here was the embodiment of an up-to-date 
American shop. 

Picture in your mind's eye the most bustling, 
largely advertised go-ahead place you know within 
the British Isles, and see how it stands in comparison 
with the Siegel Cooper Company. Down in the 
basement are fourteen engines, nine dynamos, and 
thirty-two electrical motors. Besides the wide, 
ever-moving staircase are ten passenger and thir- 
teen freight elevators, and on an ordinary day they 
journey ninety-five miles. There are over 1,000 
miles of electric wire. There is a ladies' waiting- 
room fitted up in Empire style. For purchasers of 
men and women's clothing there are private fitting 
rooms in abundance. On the floor where the furni- 
ture is, are half-a-dozen rooms carpeted and papered. 
When a young couple, for instance, fancy a suite, 
the suite is arranged in a room so that they may get 
an idea of how the furniture will look — much more 
attractive than when it is standing higgledy-pig- 
gledy among a mass of other furniture. The fourth 
floor is devoted to groceries. Here are crowds to 
buy meat and fish, and behind the salesmen are 300 
feet of double glass-faced refrigerators. In a corner 



28 AMERICA AT WORK. 

is a dairy, and butter is made while you wait. At 
several places men give lectures on how to prepare 
special dishes. 

Every floor had its speciality. On one is a wine 
business. On another a menagerie, and you can pur- 
chase a canary or a monkey. Then another floor is 
devoted to mail-orders, preparing and despatching 
goods ordered by letter. On the roof is a conserva- 
tory and photographic gallery. There is an art 
gallery with scores of oil paintings, purchased, 
according to my friend, in the " Eue de Shamps! " 
There is a restaurant like the grill room of the 
Trocadero. A doctor is kept on the premises. 

There are seventy-two departments. In the busy 
season between five and six thousand persons are 
employed. The approximate value of the stock is 
£400,000. 

The goods were not of English quality, and 
the prices were dear. But there was dash and 
enthusiasm; there was that large optimism which 
makes Americans the greatest business plungers in 
the world. The men I talked with and who direct 
these concerns by no means impressed me with 
superior business qualities. Their secret of success 
seemed to be supreme confidence that they each, 
individually, could not do anything but succeed. 



CHAPTER III. 

RAPID TRANSIT IN NEW YORK. 

YOU pay a nickel — which is five cents, or two- 
pence-halfpenny — when yon want to go by 
car in New York from one street corner to the 
next. If you want to go as far as a car will 
take you, about eight miles, you still only pay a 
nickel. 

Time is too short to get a ticket and have it 
punched and lose it, and then rummage through all 
your pockets to find it again so that the inspector 
may see you are not a friend of the conductor and 
riding free. There is no conductor coming round 
every five minutes with a penny-in-the-slot brass 
box to make you constantly fumble for and then 
dribble your pennies. There are no halfpenny rides. 
Also there are no sixpenny or eightpenny rides. 

You jump upon one of the electric cars, open or 
closed, that with the clang of fire bells clear a path 
up Broadway — ruthlessly, brutally, dividing even a 
funeral procession in two. The conductor swings 
himself along the footboard, and you, drowsy 
foreigner, and your neighbour — a shop girl possibly, 
trim and neat, but who is chewing contortively, 
worse even than the conductor, though he chews 
tobacco and she chews gum — push your nickels into 
his hand. He gives a tug at a cord, and a clock- 



30 AMERICA AT WORK. 

face signals that you are the seventy-first and 
seventy-second passengers that have mounted since 
he started that trip " up town." 

That is all, except that when you wish to ** cross 
town " you shout " Transfer." The conductor gives 
you a red slip, and you jump into a ** cross town " 
car and there present the slip instead of the nickel. 

The plan is excellent. You pay a lot for a short 
ride; but you get a long ride for a little money. 
It suits a hustling community. 

There is the Manhattan Elevated Railway, which 
enshrouds streets with ugly gridirons. Overhead 
come rattling and roaring the trains. The air is 
choked with grime. The frame ironwork and the 
whirling dust make the shops abutting the pave- 
ment dingy and sordid. From a Manhattan Elevated 
Railway, too, you can at times get a good view into 
the bedrooms of houses. 

You must remember that Manhattan Island 
is Euclidian — it has length without breadth. The 
bottom end, the business end, is more valuable than 
Cheapside, and, as the City cannot expand, the solu- 
tion of getting all the offices within biscuit-shot is 
to let them shoot upwards and rub their heads 
against the clouds. When you get from twenty to 
thirty layers of offices in one building you have a 
throng of humanity that would not find toe room if 
they had all to stand on level earth. 

There are two interesting sights of business 
crowds in the world. 

The first is the black, surging throng that crosses 
London Bridge going City-wards every morning 



RAPID TRANSIT IN NEW YORK. 31 

between nine and ten ; the second is the struggling, 
fighting, furious mob that wants to cross Brooklyn 
Bridge every evening between five and six. 

New York settles down to work between seven 
and nine o'clock in the morning, but it stops work 
at the stroke of five on summer afternoons. Then 
the bottom doors of the sky-scrapers pour humanity 
into the streets as from a hopper. 

The average New Yorker, like the average 
American, is a good-natured fellow, but he has had 
little time to be courteous. If he wants to get on 
a car, and it is necessary to knock you down, it 
is your look-out. He is rude, but he laughs, and 
expects you to laugh also. He does not want to be 
discourteous ; he merely wants to get home. 

So he crowds, and stands, and clings to the cars 
going " up town." It is an uncomfortable way, but 
it is quick, and quickness is the apple of his eye. 

Women on the cars take their chances. They 
stand and cling with the rest. It is the rarest 
thing for a man to offer his seat. A woman does 
not mind standing with five men sitting behind her. 
She does not talk at them, as an Englishwoman 
might, about there being no gentlemen present. It 
is no sign of inferiority that she stands while they 
sit. It is evidence of equality. She would not be 
expected to give her seat to a man. 

The great ferry boats, the size of small islands, 
that surge across the Hudson Eiver to Jersey City, 
are wedged with returning workers after five o'clock. 

But it is at Brooklyn Bridge that the thousands 
gather and do their best to kill one another. 



32 AMERICA AT WORK. 

Brooklyn is the Brixton of New York. It is the 
place of residence of men who get the wages of 
colliers, but who like to dress like coal-owners! 
There is only one bridge across the East Eiver — 
another is being completed higher up — and towards 
this the men clerks and the women typewriters of 
New York dash with the haste of pest-stung cattle. 
It is a sand-glass of a way, and the human sands 
press from the working bulb to the sleeping bulb. 

There are cars over the bridge. They come from 
Brooklyn with a harsh noise like the grinding of 
teeth. They make a swinging loop, and start back. 
It is then that the fighting takes place. I have seen 
people quieter in a fire panic. Folks in delicate 
health must forego the ride and walk. The 
healthy, the lusty, the determined, get in one great 
mdee. It is not unusual for somebody to be killed. 

All of which shows that New York, like some 
European cities, has trouble in bringing its com- 
mercial population into the middle of things, and 
then greater trouble getting them to their homes 
again. 

While London is chiefly talking about how it 
is going to bring its million business men into " the 
square mile " from suburban districts, and send them 
back again in the evening, and while rival schemes 
are debated and rival promoters trip one another up 
before Parliamentary Committees, and the Londoner 
— most phlegmatic of creatures — travels from dirty 
stations in dirty carriages in dawdling trains. New 
York has taken hold of the great question of speedy 
and cheap transit, and is going to settle it. 



RAPID TRANSIT IN NEW YORK. 33 

A " cut and cover " line is being laid of nearly 
twenty-one miles in length. The contractor is getting 
£7,000,000 ($36,000,000) for doing the work, and as 
there are the customary " extras," the entire cost 
will be about £10,000,000. The money is being pro- 
vided out of the city purse. 

For seven and a quarter miles, through the 
busiest part of New York, there will be four tracks. 
On the two outside tracks will travel slow trains at 
a speed of fourteen miles an hour, stopping about 
every quarter of a mile. On the other two tracks 
will travel express trains, at thirty miles an hour, 
stopping every mile-and-a-half or two miles. Every- 
thing will be driven by electric power, and the fare 
from any point will be twopence-halfpenny (five 
cents) . 

When the four lines of tracks have gone seven 
miles they branch off in pairs country-wards, seven 
and three-quarter miles continuing by subway, and 
five and three-quarters by viaduct. 

That rapid transit line is now being made. It 
is going to relieve New York of its fearsome con- 
gestion. But it has turned many of the leading, 
streets into trenches, the blasting of the rock is kill- 
ing almost as many men as the Manchester Ship 
Canal, the pools of sluggish water are special breed- 
ing places for mosquitoes in the summer months. 
Of all the cities on earth which it was well not to live 
in, New York of 1902 took premier place. 

It is a big scheme, is this laying of rapid transit 
routes. And its development is one of the best 
stories I know of how Americans take hold of big 

D 



34 AMERICA AT WORK. 

things with both hands, slapping or pushing, or 
kicking on one side all those things we British folk 
call obstacles, and get where they want, if I may 
change the simile and adopt Wall Street vernacular, 
'' on both feet." 

The origin of the movement was in the pre- 
historic times of over eleven long years ago. The 
germ was a speech given before the New York 
Chamber of Commerce, and it grew into something 
tangible in 1894, when a Board of Rapid Transit 
Railroad Commissioners was appointed; the Mayor 
of New York and the President of the Chamber of 
Commerce for the time being were ex-of&cio members. 
Other men, leading townsmen, were named, and 
when any of them fell out through sickness or death, 
the rest were to nominate a successor. Thus a per- 
petual Board was created. 

First they decided a railway or railways should 
be built, and then that it should be at the public 
expense. To be certain they were stepping in the 
right path, the question of municipal construction 
was put to the popular vote, and carried by 132,647 
to 42,916. A route was decided upon ; but opponents 
got the Supreme Court to refuse sanction to the plan 
unless it could be shown the cost would be less than 
£10,000,000. 

That set the Board to prepare another scheme, 
and they soon had plans ready for a rapid transit 
route, to cost £7,000,000. That seemed all right. 
New York is a rich municipality, and thirty-ftve 
million dollars are but as the expenses of a millic«i- 
aire's wedding trip. 



BAPID TRANSIT IN NEW YORK. 36 

New York was ambitious: it wanted to become 
Greater New York. It did this by taking under its 
management Brooklyn and Jersey City. Then it 
seemed not to be so easy after all to raise that 
£7,000,000. It looked as though the scheme might 
drop through, or have to be given to a private cor- 
poration, till the Commissioners took off their coats, 
thought hard, and devised another scheme. 

This is the scheme, the outcome of hard thinking : 
For £7,000,000 Mr. John McDonald constructs and 
equips the Eapid Transit Eailroad within four and 
a half years. He undertakes to operate it under a 
lease of fifty years. For this right he is to pay as 
rental a sum .equal to the interest upon the money 
borrowed by the city and 1 per cent. more. 

Thus New York is getting its rapid transit for 
nothing. The 1 per cent, sinking fund in fifty years 
will have considerably reduced the principal, and 
when, half a century hence, the lease is to be renewed, 
the city will expect good terms. 

It is also good for Mr. John McDonald. He has 
no financing expenses; his capital is the city's 
credit; he is relieved from all the vexations of a 
private capitalist coming into conflict with city 
bye-laws. 

The ** cut and cover,'* or shallow excavation type 
subway, has been adopted on the advice of Mr. Bar- 
clay Parsons, chief engineer to the Commissioners. 
He was against the " twopenny tube " scheme, for, 
while under this plan there is no interference with 
street traffic during construction, the elevators or 
lifts necessary are not satisfactory when there is 



36 AMERICA AT WORK. 

a tremendous congestion. Further, the cost of 
tunnelling is apt to be greater than open construc- 
tions. He was against the underground arched 
tunnel system, such as we have on the Metropolitan 
and District Eailways in London, because it has all 
the disadvantages of a compromise. Property is 
disturbed; the cost is substantially as great as 
tunnelling, and, though there are no elevators, the 
distance from street to platform is too far to walk 
in these days of haste. 

After talking with men in Boston (Massachu- 
setts), in Buda-Pesth (Hungary), and in Glasgow 
(Scotland), he advised, and the Commissioners 
adopted, the " cut and cover " plan, which means the 
trenching of the streets and the interference with 
traffic while excavations are progressing, causing 
inconvenience to property-owners, and necessitating 
the readjustment of all mains and sewers; but, on 
the other hand, bringing the railroad platform 
within fourteen feet of the pavement, and lighting 
it with daylight, and even sunshine, through a thick 
glass roof which pedestrians above will use as a 
side-walk. 

The formation of Manhattan Island, heaving and 
dipping — the heave solid rock, and the dip shingle 
and sand — is such that the shallow construction 
has not been Dy any means absolutely adhered to. 
There are ten and a half miles of *' cut and cover,** 
four and a half miles of tunnel, and just over five 
miles of viaduct. The minimum of depth, however, 
is the rule, and for the ten and a half miles of " cut 
and cover " the roof is the street level, is only thirty 



RAPID TRANSIT IN NEW YORK. 37 

inches thick, and rests on steel ribs five feet apart. 
I talked with Mr. Barclay Parsons, a quiet but 
decisive man, and he told me the railway ought to 
be working in about two years. Also, he explained 
one or two points. The first seven miles will be 
covered by express trains in fourteen minutes, and 
the local trains in half an hour. The motive power 
will be electricity or compressed air, and if any 
better generating or transmitting power be dis- 
covered for railway working, the Commissioners can 
demand, on two months' notice, that Mr. McDonald 
adopt it. 

Though there is to be one charge of twopence- 
halfpenny, Mr. McDonald will have liberty to 
attach not more than one superior fitted car to 
each train, and to make an extra charge. Passengers 
may travel on the express to a station, get into a 
train on the other side of the platform, and so stop 
at a local station between the express stoppages. 
The platforms are to be arranged so that this skipping 
from train to train may be easy and rapid. To save 
more time there will be loop-tracks at the terminals, 
to avoid reversals of the trains, and to ensure con- 
tinuous running. There will be no ** cellar air " 
smell ; there will be no smoke. Everything is to be 
clean, clear, and quick — above all, quick. 

I have said that New York has solved the rapid 
transit difficulty. Yet, after all, I feel inclined to 
recall my words. 

New York solves nothing. Its passion is dis- 
content, change. To the scrap-heap with most things 
— and let us have something different ! And twenty 



38 AMERICA AT WORK. 

years hence New Yorkers will be smiling at the 
" cut and cover " subway as an anachronism, and 
inviting the admiration of the world for another 
scheme to relieve the congestion caused by seventy- 
nine-storey buildings ! 



CHAPTER IV. 

HOW RAILWAY ENGINES ARE BUILT. 

IT was in the erecting shop of Baldwin's locomotive 
works at Philadelphia. 

The air was hot and black, and tasted of steel 
filings. One thousand seven hundred and sixty- 
five men were working as though there was a compe- 
tition and the prize was worth having. Most of them 
were slim, sinewy, gritty fellows, and their open shirts 
showed chests glossy with sweat and dust. There 
was the clatter of hammers that rang like musketry 
fire. There were great thuds to remind one of the 
story of Thor swinging his mallet. 

Overhead were huge travelling cranes. As in 
the car of a balloon sat a man beneath the biggest 
of these. He pulled a lever, and with the powerful 
ease of a warship slipping from dock the great crane, 
that could carry several ordinary English railway 
engines without a grunt, ran to the other end of 
the shop. The pulling of another bolt swung the 
car to one side, and down came stout cables of 
chain, and these were thrown round a great boiler. 
The boiler swung into the air, swung into the centre, 
swung down to where I stood, and was left on a 
steel frame. 

From the time when the crane started on its 



40 AMERICA AT WORK 

journey till it came back, having deposited its load, 
was one minute thirty-five seconds. 

All over the shop were mammoth American loco- 
motives — compared in size w^ith our home engines 
they are as Atlantic liners to English Channel boats 
— in all stages from the skeleton to the completed. 
There were seventy-five in all, from the boiler I had 
seen swung upon a frame, to the big, brutal, finished 
locomotive, with stunt chimney and a face as grim 
and death-dealing as a torpedo-catcher, that was 
heaved up on winches, and had steam up and was 
snorting and whirling its wheels to show that it was 
all right before it was lifted by that mighty crane, 
deposited on one of the two railway tracks, and rolled 
out into the open — the finished article. 

From Baldwin's there pass from thirty-six to 
forty engines a week, say six a day. 

" What is the number of that locomotive just 
going out?" bawled the manager, with upraised 
hands, into the ear of a foreman. 

" No. 20,842, sir ; but we're sending out nearly 
twenty more to-day." 

The obvious question came into my mind, and I 
put it. " Suppose I gave you the specifications for 
a locomotive I wanted built, what is the quickest time 
in which you could supply it? " 

" Eight clear days," came the answer like a shot. 

The manager saw something in my eye, for he 
added quickly : " Oh, but I tell you we've done it. 
It was a test case, but it was done. When? On 
Saturday, June 22nd, 1886, Mr. Robert B. Coleman 
ordered an American type passenger locomotive and 




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HOW RAILWAY ENGINES ARE BUILT. 41 

tender, and we agreed it should be ready for service 
on his railroad in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, 
on July 4th. The boiler material was ordered by 
telegraph, and we got it on Tuesday, the 25th. The 
boiler was made by Friday, the 28th. On Monday, 
July 1st, the machinery, frame, wheels, and so forth, 
were attached. The tender was completed and the 
locomotive tried under steam on Tuesday, July 2nd. 
That was the record construction of a complete loco- 
motive from raw material, and the time was eight 
days. That shows what we can do when we are 
pushed." 

A young fellow came along, and in the ear- 
cracking din we were introduced. " Glad to see 
you, sir," he said, with bright welcome in his eyes. 
" When I get a bit of spare time I'm going over to 
see how you do things in your country." 

When he had gone I asked who he was. " Oh, 
that's our superintendent. He has the control of 
the fourteen thousand men in Baldwin's." 

" Is he a member of the firm ? " I inquired. 

*' Oh, dear no. Ten years ago he was a mechanic 
like any of these men. He brought out some inven- 
tions which perfected oil-burning engines. That 
gave him a start in rising." 

" But he is only a lad," I persisted. 

*' Oh, not such a lad. Why, by now he must be 
thirty-two at least." 

There was a black monster of a locomotive 
making much steam and fuss on its way out. On the 
tender was painted " Southern Pacific." Another 
was for South Africa, another for New Zealand, 



42 AMERICA AT WORK. 

another for Japan. I recalled having seen Baldwin's 
engines the previous year on the Trans-Siberian 
line. 

In England? Yes! The Midland run forty of 
Baldwin's engines, the Great Northern twenty, and 
the Great Central twenty. How Baldwin's got the 
order? Well, it was just after the great engineering 
strike in England, when the English builders were 
so full of work they couldn't promise to supply under 
eighteen months, and Baldwin's stepped in with an 
offer to supply as many as were wanted in six 
months. 

I put it bluntly that these American engines had 
not come up to expectations ; that they consumed far 
more coal than English built locomotives, and that 
they passed too much of their time in the repair shops. 

** Well," was the reply of the manager, '* I'm not 
going to deny anything I don't know. If our loco- 
motives break down in England, all I say is that 
it*8 very strange. They don't break down in 
America, and Baldwin's has been in existence since 
1832, and we have turned out over 20,000 engines. 
I guess there is a little prejudice among builders in 
your country. As to burning more coal, that is true 
enough. I'll tell you the reason. The weight of your 
average English locomotive is forty-five to fifty tons. 
Those we built were to the specifications supplied by 
the English companies, and were about 120 tons. 
Greater weight means greater haulage power. If, 
of course, you give an engine of 120 tons the same 
amount to haul as you give a 45-ton engine it 
will use more coal. Because a man is asked to 



HOW RAILWAY ENGINES ARE BUILT. 43 

pull a child's cart you mustn't grumble at him 
eating more than a child. But give an American 
engine twice, nearly three times as much to haul as 
your English engine can haul, and then you will 
find that in the cost of getting goods over your 
roads from point to point there is a considerable 
saving in the coal bill by using an American loco- 
motive." 

I went all over Baldwin's works. For the better 
part of two days I was within their walls, watching, 
listening, comparing, trying to get a grip of how 
this great firm hustled in the building of locomotives. 

There is more than a touch of the heroic in the 
calm masterfulness of huge machinery. If you get 
the right mental focus there is a dignity rising to 
the sublime in a man with sweat on his chest and the 
kneading muscles telling of his strength. 

I saw those fourteen thousand men at work. I 
saw many grey hairs, but I saw no old men. 
Baldwin's, to me, was the apotheosis of young 
American vigour. 

You may know the clang of a boiler shop, when 
the ruddy bolts fresh from the furnace are pushed 
through the drill holes, and men swing their 
hammers and punch the red nose into a slate-blue 
knob. But have you seen a mighty cylinder of a 
boiler, its parts only casually bolted, heaved into the 
air by a travelling crane and swung before a hy- 
draulic hammer, and when the red bolt has been 
pushed through, one little tap from the hammer beat- 
ing down the bolt as though it were red putty ? 

Have you been in a tank riveting shop where 



44 AMERICA AT WORK. 

the noise is like a scream of hammers, and yet not 
a single hammer is swung ; where there are furnaces 
from which young fellows with long tongs pick red- 
hot bolts, and send them flying through the air as 
though a game of tip-cat were on, the flying bolt 
caught in a wire ladle, gripped with tongs, pushed 
through the drill holes, and then a man trailing 
about with him something like a garden hose, press- 
ing the nozzle on the bolt ; and have 3^ou heard the 
air rip like the teeth of a steam saw in a beam, but 
a hundred thousand times intensified, as the pneu- 
matic riveter punches the bolt ? At Baldwin's you 
see men riveting a locomotive tank with the speed 
of a joiner driving a nail into a fence — that is, if 
he is an expert joiner. 

There are neither shafts nor belts. All machinery 
is driven by electric motors. Some of the shops 
seam just stock rooms of axles and wheels. But 
there are machines for turning them close by. 
And the silent demon of a travelling crane comes 
along, picks up a couple of wheels, carries them off, 
and brings back another pair to be turned. 

As in modern houses the kitchen is often near 
the roof so that the smell of cooking food shall not 
offend the nostrils of folks in the drawing-room, 
Baldwin's have their forge on the second floor of one 
building and the brass foundry on the top of another, 
with the brass machine-shop below. 

Though there be a town of men in Baldwin's, it 
seems a scanty town. That is because the works are 
so large, and instead of crowds of men working 
together you get one or two here, another two there, 



HOW RAILWAY ENGINES ARE BUILT. 45 

a third couple elsewhere, and so on, controlling the 
machinery that is doing the work. 

Yet every man is on scratch, as it were ; all his 
nerves are on tension ; all his wits are at play. He 
has to give all his energy to get the maximum of 
work out of a machine. If he is a laggard he 
doesn't stay with the Baldwin Locomotive Company. 

That is why young men are favoured at Bald- 
win's, and in all business concerns in America. The 
American manufacturer doesn't care a red cent for 
what is a special object of reverence to the British 
manufacturer — experience. What he wants is the 
man who can do the work quickly and just as he 
wants it. The American manufacturer knows the 
young man will make mistakes which the elder man 
will avoid. But the young man has no conservative 
ideas. He wants to get on, and he wants to get rich. 
In his own language, " he wants to get right there," 
and he gets there — somehow! 

The American manufacturer pays his men well, 
not always because he is obliged, but because he 
finds that by paying a man an extra penny an hour 
over regular wages he puts such an impetus into 
that man that he gets threepence more of work out 
of him. 

No sentimentalist in his business relations is the 
American manufacturer. He is bed-rock at money- 
making, and he has young men because he finds 
they are more resourceful than their fathers. He 
pays them, not at the lowest market rate, which 
means poor food, discontent, and sloth, but at a rate 
that will feed them well, put spice into their ^ns, 



46 AMERICA AT WORK. 

and soul into their work. There are no half- 
holidays at Baldwin's. The men work from seven to 
six, with one hour oif at mid-day, six days in the 
week, except for the summer months, and then work 
stops at four on Saturday afternoons. 

That spirit of hustling on which the American 
prides himself is a product of environment and 
atmosphere. There is something that braces in the 
American climate, that makes a man hustle even 
if he doesn't want to. He does a thing at a scamper 
unconsciously, and because everybody else does 
things at a scamper. In a boiler-shop I saw a man 
run to get a hammer, and run back again. I've 
racked my brains, but I cannot remember ever seeing 
a British working man run for a tool. 

One of the most interesting things in the United 
States is the metamorphosis of a British working 
man into an American working man. It takes about 
a year — no longer. At first he is slow ; he seems to 
crawl; he likes to rest and look about; if there is 
anything to be brought, it is brought saunter ingly. 
But the inevitable change comes. He gets the yellow 
out of his eye, and he *' gets a move on " ; elasticity 
comes into his muscles, and in twelve months he is 
a hustler. 

" We have many hundreds of Englishmen work- 
ing at Baldwin's," I was told, " and after their first 
year they are just as smart workmen as any native 
bom American we have." 

The system of work is such that if a man wants 
to make a first-rate wage, in the American sense, he 
must work hard, and very hard. The minimum 



HOW RAILWAY ENGINES ARE BUILT. 47 

wage of all workmen at Baldwin's is 6|d. an hour. 
If a man gets below that he gets his dismissal. Each 
shop has a foreman, and the foreman has a settled 
wage to walk round with his eyes open. Each 
section of work, from boiler-making down to brass 
nozzles, is in charge of a contractor. 

The firm receives a big order for locomotives. 
From the price they subtract what they consider 
their share. Then they divide the rest up in pro- 
portion; so much for the steel frame, so much for 
the boiler plates, so much for riveting, so much for 
this and the other, down to the finest detail. They 
call in the contractor of the riveting shop. They 
say, ** We want the riveting done for twenty engines 
at such a price." That price will not only pay the 
6|d. an hour to first-rate workmen, but leave a 
good margin. It is then for the contractor to get 
the work as cheaply done — never less than the 
13J cents an hour — and as quickly as possible to 
leave him a profit and be ready for another con- 
tract. The contractor picks his men, the best pos- 
sible, and the second best are left to do labouring 
jobs at 13 J cents, or they are dismissed. He says 
to the men — as he can do at Baldwin's, where there 
are nearly two years of orders scheduled — " I pay 
you each 9d. or lOd. an hour." The men agree, and 
the price is reported to the foreman. If the contractor 
thinks he can get more work still out of this or that 
man, he will get the foreman's permission to pay him 
lid. or Is. an hour. 

It seems odd to the British mind that because 
you are paying a man well to work his hardest you 



48 AMEEICA AT WORK. 

should pay him more to get out of him an extra 
hardest. But it is the American idea that the harder 
a man works the harder he can work. And, working 
under a stimulus like this, an American working 
man will often do double, and even treble the work 
of a British working man. But though it is at an 
increased wage, it is not a double or treble wage, 
and that is where the American manufacturer scores. 
The contractor does not pay the men. He pre- 
sents a sheet of their earnings, and the workers 
get paid every Friday night up to the previous 
Saturday, so that almost a week's wages are held 
in hand. All this is for various reasons. Baldwin's 
know how much the contractor pays the men, 
whether he is disposed to " sweat " them near the 
minimum wage, and also exactly what his profit is 
on the contract price after the payment of the men. 
It is a fair assumption that if he makes a very big 
profit he will not be given so high a price for the 
next contract. Baldwin's will want an extra bite. 
That the sanction of the lynx-eyed foreman, a sort 
of firm's detective, is required for every additional 
cent of incentive to a man, leads the contractor, if 
he sees a large profit in sight which would mean 
cutting down the price next time, to make an 
arrangement with the mechanics that they should 
have their wages put up so that Baldwin's may think 
he is not making so large a fortune after all. These 
things, however, adjust themselves, and contractors 
and men work to a general average of pay. 

It is a hard system — not so hard at Baldwin's, 
for Baldwin's among American works is almost an 






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HOW RAILWAY ENGINES ARE BUILT. 49 

ideal place — but nevertheless relentless in its effect. 
It means that the slow man, however good, only 
earns the minimum wage of 6|d. an hour, and is 
dismissed without notice with his week of pay the 
instant the demand for labour falls. There is no 
such thing as working for stock in dull seasons. It 
means also that the good man gets good pay — far 
more than he could possibly get in England. But 
he has to work at the highest pressure of all his 
powers. 

It is a strenuous life. It is a life that appeals 
to the stalwart, work-loving, determined American 
young man. It is a life of strained nerves. It ex- 
plained many of the grey hairs I saw on boyish 
heads. It explained also why I saw hardly any grey 
beards. 

" Where are your elderly workmen ?" I asked a 
Philadelphia manufacturer once, twice, three times. 

At the third time he opened his cigar case. With 
a careless smile he said, " Have a smoke, and we'll 
take a car ride along to the cemetery! " 



CHAPTER V. 

SCENES IN PITTSBURG. 

IF you would see Pittsburg aright you should take 
a drive in the evening, when dusk has settled, 
to Highland Park, a loftily perched spot, and 
from there look on the city. 

There will be a smell of sulphur in your nostrils, 
and there will be a wondrous sight before your eyes. 

Illuminated with fierce nether lights there hangs 
before you a great brown sheet of smoke, black 
toward the heavens, ochreish toward the earth. 
Now and then you think the clouds are on fire, a 
curious eerie white fire with a suggestion of green 
in it, as though some volcano had lit up the world. 

Far below, in patches, with splotches of blackness 
in between, are the lurid lights of great furnaces. 
The glow seems red and yellow mixed, and savage 
tongues curve up to and lick the clouds. 

Suddenly, continuously, yet irregularly, here and 
there, then a break, then over yonder a fresh light 
as though an electric flame of million power had 
turned liquid and was flowing a river of lava, illu- 
mined the world as lightning does, only tenfold more 
vivid, intense, piercing, than ever lightning was. 
The molten metal was being released, poured into 
cauldrons the size of Thor*s helmet, swung — a dish of 
blue-white, pale, but lucid light — to castings. For 



SCENES IN PITTSBURG. 61 

a whole minute the earth would quiver in the 
brilliance of the outpouring. 

It was too far off to see workmen. But the great 
machinery could be seen swinging, almost rhyth- 
matically, to its work ; cars on railway tracks could 
be discerned shunting; there was a dull, far-off 
clanging roar. There was a clap of clattering steel, 
and then a long hissing, frothy sound. 

The big buildings stood out sombre and gaunt. 
The steely whiteness waned, and once more, for a 
minute, half a minute, two minutes maybe, there 
was only the ruddiness of the giant furnaces — a soft- 
ness to the eye after the keenness of that liquid 
steel. 

That is how I saw Pittsburg on the night I left 
it. I had seen the city in the cruel, naked light of 
day. I had seen much that thrilled me with admira- 
tion, much that was unpleasant, and a great deal 
that was unlovely. 

But the thing I shall longest recall was the sight 
of the steel capital of the world as I saw it that 
evening — a Brocken scene, weird, awesome, with the 
poetry of power in it, that only Turner would have 
painted in justice, and with the rustling of the 
leaves to suggest the shrieks of the Valkyrie. 

They call Pittsburg the Sheffield of America. 
There are many points of resemblance. 

There are few places more unbeautif ul on a damp, 
dreary day than Sheffield — except Pittsburg. It was 
early one Saturday morning I arrived in Pittsburg 
after an all-night journey on a railroad car. My 
hotel lay some distance away, and as I drove up a 



52 AMERICA AT WORK. 

new boulevard that hugs the side of a hill, I was able 
to look down through a haze of brown smoke on a 
sweep of ugly ironworks, dingy and sordid, the air 
riven with clatter, like musketry fire far off. 

We have dreary spots in England and Scotland, 
where manufacturing has bleached the grass off the 
face of the earth, and leafless trees stretch bare arms 
even in prime summer time. But I cannot remember 
having seen anything that depressed me quite so 
much as Pittsburg did that morning. The nearest 
parallel in drab dreariness is the Staffordshire 
pottery district in dirty weather. 

The town is a business town and nothing else. 
The buildings are tall and grimy ; the streets narrow 
compared with other American towns. I went into 
some of the poorer districts. I have seen our slums in 
English towns, foul and loathsome, but never quite 
so bad as those I saw in Pittsburg. I was told that 
in Chicago I would see slums equalling those of the 
East End of London. I, of course, saw many things 
that were unhappy, but her ghetto and *' little Italy " 
are by no means horrible sinks. The Pittsburg 
slums are dreadful, the houses wheezy, unsteady, 
filthy, many of the women slatterns. Sewage often 
disgraces the roadway. In one street I saw a lake, 
that stretched half across the way, of little else but 
sewage. 

The people are not stunted, pukeish, scraggy- 
made, as one often sees folks in our own bits of black 
country. But I did miss in Pittsburg that clearness 
of skin, that boyish, healthy fulness of face, that 
well-set carriage which is rather a distinguishing 



SCENES IN PITTSBURG. 53 

feature of most Americans, of which they have 
reason to be proud, and which they should hold to 
as something infinitely more valuable than dollars. 

The men were pale, worn, not well set up, and 
they were all anxious-faced. The crown of most 
American towns is the beauty of the women. To be 
candid, even at the risk of rousing displeasure, I 
cannot write that the women of Pittsburg were the 
peers of their sisters in other towns. 

And having written that which strikes the 
visitor as unpleasant, let me describe some of the 
things that Pittsburg takes to its credit ; Pittsburg, 
the hub of the steel industry, where, though the sur- 
roundings be ugly, where the people are sickly 
visaged, the air tastes sulphurous, brains are keen, 
machinery is the acme of invention, where, indeed, 
the outsider, like myself, may stand a little apart 
and admire unfeignedly what Man can do in the 
strenuous industry of steel production. 

The young men ! All the workmen seemed to be 
little more than lads. There were middle-aged men 
to be seen, but they were comparatively few, and it 
was almost necessary to look for them. I was in 
Pittsburg on Labour Day— the first Monday in 
September. There was a great parade of thousands 
of men, each section headed with band and banners, 
and they marched from the centre of the town to 
Schenley Park. I have seen plenty of labour de- 
monstrations in England, and the contrast was 
marked. In England the demonstrators have their 
bands and banners also. But the men are usually 



54 AMERICA AT WORK. 

middle-aged, usually wear their best Sunday clothes, 
and with doggedness in their manner march stolidly 
along the streets. The Pittsburg demonstration was 
chiefly made up of young men. They marched in 
fours, but not on one another's heels and shoulder to 
shoulder. They spread themselves out, paces apart, 
and marched with the stately stride of a funeral 
procession. 

The American dearly loves parades, gorgeous, 
and with plenty of colour. He has a vigorous con- 
tempt for orders conferred by European sovereigns 
on their subjects. But he has orders of his own, 
and every third man you meet in the streets has a 
little insignia in his buttonhole proclaiming he is 
a " knight," or something else with a high-falutin* 
name, in the Grand Order of Something or Other. 
A British soldier with the Victoria Cross is not half 
so proud as an American who has a medal. When 
Prince Henry of Prussia visited Chicago some of the 
leading merchants who had won medals at exhibi- 
tions wore those honours for high quality tinned beef 
upon their breasts. 

Every one of these demonstrators on Labour Day 
was in uniform of sorts. They were in white duck 
trousers, blue shirts, and straw hats: often a 
hundred men dressed alike. Others wore uniforms 
of grey. Others had a particular style of cap and a 
particular patterned tie. Every trade or section of 
a trade was garbed uniformly. There were plenty 
of bands, and it was all very pretty and effec- 
tive, despite the wet discomfort of the morning. 
But what a procession of boys it did seem. Yet 



SCENES IN PITTSBURG. 56 

those boys were the sinew which has made Pittsburg 
famous. 

To me every town has an individuality, a per- 
sonality, almost as marked as any human being can 
have. And Pittsburg has an individuality of its 
own — not the pagan love for money which marks 
Chicago, not the excitement of commercial conquest 
which distinguishes New York, not the courteous 
dignity and refinement of Boston ; but the individual- 
ity of strength, of the mastery of labour, of man who 
through grime and sweat has fire and iron under his 
control. 

It was not a town I would like to live in. Indeed, 
it is a place I would avoid. There are the fumes of 
Gehenna about it. The work is hard, and there is 
not much of what we call the beauty of life to be got 
there. But there is labour triumphant over matter 
— and that is a noble sight for the eye of man to rest 
upon. 

One day an acquaintance took me a drive to show 
me that, though Pittsburg itself was unlovely, the 
surrounding country had more than a touch of 
romantic grandeur. He was right. But hovering in 
the sky was a dun pall, and when I looked over the 
shoulder of a hill it would be as into a valley of 
desolation. That was why on the evening I left 
Pittsburg I stood on a hill to see it in the grandeur 
of flame illuminating the night. 

It was on that drive that a well-set buggy, with a 
smart horse and an alert, youngish man holding the 
reins, dashed by. 

** That's one of Andrew Carnegie's millionaires," 



66 AMERICA AT WORK. 

my companion said. *' Yes," he went on, " we don't 
think so much of Carnegie as a brainy man over here 
as you folks do in the old country. It wasn't he 
who built up the business, but the men he got round 
him." 

" Well," I commented, " that is the highest form 
of business genius ; to spot good men and hold on to 
them." 

"Gee-whish!" exclaimed my companion, "I 
guess you're right. And there ain't no one that can 
see the use of a man like Carnegie. Do you know that 
Carnegie has made thirty-one millionaires ? 'Struth ! 
You know he would go about the works, and he 
would see or hear of some young chap that was smart. 
If he thought there was anything in him he would 
give him something better to do, then something 
better still ; then he would make him a foreman, and 
gee-whish, again, if a fellow had sand in him, up 
and up he went. Carnegie would push a chap of 
twenty-five or twenty-six into a place of responsi- 
bility that would make you giddy. When Carnegie 
had a good man he gave him full rope ; he didn't 
hamper him ; he had sense to understand there were 
times when he himself didn't know best. 

" And he paid well. Because a fellow was young 
and unmarried he didn't think a small salary was 
enough. He flung big salaries about. What was 
$10,000 or $20,000 a year if he got $200,000 
worth of brains in return! Yes, I guess there 
are hard things said among the workpeople about 
Carnegie. They're the tools that work the machines. 
There's plenty of them to be had, and Carnegie hasn't 




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SCEISTES IN PITTSBURG. 67 

paid more in wages than he has been forced to. 
But for young fellows with brains, lots of brains, 
brains that can see through a ten-inch armour plate, 
that's the thing for Carnegie's money. And look 
here: every brainy young engineer in America 
wanted to get into Carnegie's works. They knew 
what the pay was like, and that, at any rate, they 
would get their chance. That, I guess, is the way 
Carnegie has become rich, knowing how to get the 
right men round him. 

" You Britishers think there is something hor- 
rible in ripping the brains out of a man, so that in 
seven or eight years he has no brains left. The 
moment a man began to fag Carnegie had no more 
use for him. But he didn't chuck him out with his 
brains sucked dry and his health all in tatters. He 
gave him stock in one or other of the Carnegie com- 
panies so he needn't bother about working any 
more. And Andrew Carnegie has made million- 
aires of thirty-one of his workpeople. Say! guess 
you don't work on those lines in your old country ? " 

I was able to see something of the properties 
owned or controlled by the Carnegie Company. 
There was the Homestead steelworks, with two 
12-gross ton Bessemer converters, four cupolas, forty- 
eight open hearth steel furnaces, fourteen rolling 
mills, ninety-one soaking pits, thirty heating fur- 
naces, one beam fitting shop, a column shop, a steel 
foundry and armour plate manufacturing plant 
consisting of press shop with one 2,000-ton and one 
10,000-ton press, ten heating furnaces, a carbonis- 
ing shop with eight furnaces, and a machine shop for 



58 AMERICA AT WORK. 

finishing the armour plate. The annual capacity of 
these works is 450,000 gross tons of Bessemer steel 
ingots, and 1,500,000 gross tons of open hearth steel 
ingots. But there are the Edgar-Thompson furnaces, 
with a capacity to turn out Bessemer and basic iron 
to the extent of a million tons a year. There are the 
Duquesne furnaces, four miles away, with 800,000 
tons a year. The Carrie furnaces can turn out the 
same amount. The Lucy furnaces can turn out only 
250,000 tons. The total capacity of the nineteen 
blast furnaces is 2,850,000 tons a year. And three 
additional furnaces, with a total capacity of 320,000 
tons a year, are being built. 

The Edgar-Thompson Steel Works! Here are 
four 15-ton converters, four spiegel cupolas, twenty- 
one Siemens', and two reverberatory furnaces, one 
three-high 40-inch blooming mill; two three-high 
rail cranes, hot saws and finishing machines, an iron 
and brass foundry, a forge containing one 6-ton 
hammer and two heating furnaces. From these 
works there can be got out each year 850,000 tons of 
ingots, 650 tons of rails and billets, and 50,000 tons 
of castings. There are the Duquesne Steel Works, 
able to send out 600,000 tons of Bessemer ingots and 
450,000 tons of open hearth ingots. There are the 
Upper Union Mills and the Lower Union Mills, one 
providing 240,000 tons of structural steel, and the 
other 130,000 tons of plates and car forgings and 
bridge work. At the Howard Axle works 1,500 axles 
can be turned out each day. The total capacity of 
the st^el furnaces and converters is 3,850,000 gross 
tons a year, of which 1,900,000 are Bessemer steel 



SCENES IN PITTSBURG. 59 

and 1,950,000 basic open hearth steel. All these 
mammoth works belong to what is known as the 
Carnegie Company. 

But there are many other companies controlled 
by this company. There is the Frick Coke Company, 
which owns 40,000 acres of unmined coking coal 
in Pennsylvania, 20,000 acres of surface lands, 2,600 
railroad cars, and 45 coke works, with an aggregate 
of 11,317 coke ovens. There is the Carnegie Natural 
Gas Company with 98,000 acres of gas territory, 300 
miles of pipe lines, and 130 producing gas wells, 
supplying to the Carnegie works about thirteen 
billion cubic feet of natural gas a year, equivalent 
to about 684,000 tons of coal. There is the Pittsburg 
Bessemer and Lake Erie Eailroad Company, which 
operates 204 miles of track, 65 locomotives, 4,742 
freight, 37 passenger, and 124 service cars. 

All the iron ore mined by the Carnegie in- 
terests in the Lake Superior region is transported 
to the furnaces over their own railroad. There is 
the Union Eailroad Company, which operates 40 
miles of track, connecting the various Carnegie 
works. There is the Oliver Iron Mining Company, 
which holds in fee or by lease various iron ore pro- 
perties on the five ranges of the Lake Superior region, 
producing about a quarter of the iron ore yielded 
annually, or about 5,000,000 tons. There is the 
Pittsburg and Conneaut Dock Company on Lake 
Erie, at the terminus of the Carnegie railroad, with 
a capacity to berth nine ships at the same time, and 
handle ten million tons of iron ore a year. A 6,000- 
ton ship can be cleared in fourteen hours, and in 



60 AMERICA AT WORK 

another fourteen hours her cargo can be delivered at 
the furnaces in Pittsburg. It is claimed that a 
train of thirty-five 40-ton ore cars can be loaded in 
two hours. Indeed, so expeditious is the machinery 
that a 40-ton car of coal can be loaded and partly 
trimmed in the ship in thirty-six seconds. 

But why go on merely cataloguing how this 
octopus of a Carnegie Company throws its arms over 
fleets of steamships on the Great Lakes, controls 
waterworks, and generally plays king among indus- 
trial concerns ? It is a big example of America at 
Work, of huge ideas, tremendous accomplishments. 
And yet this swallower up of big companies has been 
swallowed up itself. It and all its properties are 
now part of the United States Steel Corporation. 

The figures I have quoted are official, and deal 
with capacity, and not output. There is no question 
that the capacity is far in excess of the output. The 
iron and steel works throughout America, indeed, are 
far bigger than necessary to supply American de- 
mands, great though those are. Twice as much pig 
iron could be produced ; nearly one and a half times 
as much roll products could be manufactured: the 
capacity for producing steel ingots is 58 per cent, 
in excess of the actual output. 

What does this mean? Does it mean the 
Ameorican steel manufacturer has been over-build- 
ing? 

I was talking to an English manufacturer not 
long ago about American steel having such a large 
nrarket in Kussia, and British having only a small 
market. 



SCENES IN PITTSBURG. 61 

*' My dear sir," he said, " my firm could have 
had as much of the Eussian steel trade as they 
wanted. But we're full up; we've constant work; 
we cannot keep pace with our orders. Why should 
we bother ourselves with seeking fresh markets?" 

It was a past president of the British Iron and 
Steel Institute who said that. There spoke the 
British manufacturer. His works were as busy as 
could be; he could not accept more orders; why 
should he bother? 

The American manufacturer looks at things dif- 
ferently. He is deliberately building works of an 
enormous capacity, not out of necessity because of 
an increased volume of trade — gigantic though that 
has been — but because he is long-sighted, and intends 
not only to supply the people who now want his stuff, 
but to have all the machinery, all the appliances, to 
pit his magnificent resources against the resources 
of the rest of the world — and he is going to do that 
before long. 

The raw material cannot at present be brought 
along fast enough to feed the furnaces ; that is why 
English ore and Scotch pig iron are being imported 
into the States. People at home complacently smile 
and say, " That shows America has to come to 
Britain for ore." It simply shows that the American 
steel industry is so prosperous that the manufacturers 
over there are glad to get ore from anywhere. 

British manufacturers have little to fear just 
now. America is too busy supplying her home 
market. But when the slump comes in the States, 
when the manufacturers find they have a surplus to 



62 AMERICA AT WORK. 

get rid of, that will be the day when the British 
manufacturer will have a rude shaking. 

The competition will be relentless, savage, and 
there will be little consideration of humanity in it. 
The country with the best brains, the best machinery, 
and the cheapest transit will win. 

England has more natural advantages than 
America. Cleveland is nearer Norway, and Cardiff 
is nearer Spain than Pittsburg is to the Lake 
Superior ore. But the cost of shipping in America 
is only half as much, despite higher wages, though 
the distance is further, and the average railroad ton 
rate charged is not more than a third of what it 
is in England. It costs from 10s. to 12s. a ton to 
send ore by rail in England for less than 150 miles. 
To take ore from Lake Erie to Pittsburg (156 miles) 
the average cost is Is. 9d. a ton. 

I wenli through the Carnegie Works at Homestead, 
and wonderful was the sight of what machinery can 
do. The thing that struck me first was how few men 
there were about. Yet there were thousands. Men sat 
in little cabs near the roof with tiny levers, and elec- 
tric power did the rest. To watch the way in which 
ingots were gripped from the furnaces, laid on rollers, 
carried along to be pressed, rolled out with steel 
fingers automatically putting them into position, you 
would have thought the machines were human. 
Then they were carried along and cut, and other 
machinery rolled the plate to a steel platform and 
laid it there to cool. In the making of steel rails, 
from the moment the ore is pitched into the furnace 
until the rail is finished, everything is done by 




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SCENES IN PITTSBURG. 63 

machinery, and no man has a direct hand in the 
work. 

Here again was another example of what I saw 
everywhere : splendid pay for brains, and the inven- 
tion of labour-saving machinery, but few skilled 
workmen. It was unskilled labour in quantity that 
was required. 



CHAPTEE VI. 

SOME WAYS THEY HAVE IN WASHINGTON. 

IF an American climbed on the steps of the Board of 
Trade Office in "Whitehall, and, without so much 
as a tap at the door or even throwing aside his 
half-smoked cigar, marched into a Government room 
with an *'0h, Mr. Board-of -Trade President, I wonder 
if you could let me have any official papers on wages," 
an Englishman would probably say he was bad 
mannered. 

An Englishman in Washington, however, who 
wants to see Government officials, but fumbles with 
letters of introduction and requests the janitor to 
take up his card, and stands knocking at a door till 
some one shouts " Come in! " is regarded as a timid 
creature with time to waste. 

" If you've come to talk business, in you go, have 
your talk, clear out when you've done, and let 
the next fellow have a chance," might be written 
over the portals of all Government Departments at 
Washington. 

I have had experiences in various parts of the 
world of getting courtesies from Governments, from 
waiting fourteen days in a Chinese city for what 
might have been provided me in an hour, to running 
the gauntlet of a British department — the door- 
keeper who doesn't know whether Mr. Cabinet 



WAYS THEY HAVE IN WASHINGTON. 65 

Minister is to be seen or not, and leaves you for ten 
minutes in a draughty corridor, then ushers you 
into a waiting-room provided with two illustrated 
papers eighteen months old, where a clerk comes and 
wants to know what you want, and goes off and 
comes back in another ten minutes and takes you 
into another room, dull furnished, and with the 
"London Directory" as reading matter; and there 
you fume until at last, three-quarters of an hour 
after crossing the threshold, you get face to face with 
the great man himself, and find him very English — 
cold, formal, but courteous. 

To Washington I took some of my British notions. 
I went to a Government office and told the function- 
ary at the door whom I wanted to see. He discharged 
a quantity of brown fluid from his mouth into a 
spittoon — cuspador is the American name, being 
more refined — and without rising from his chair, 
said, " To the left ; last door at the end of the 
passage!" 

'* Perhaps you will take my card along — and — 
and also I have a letter of introduction." 

"I guess you'll find the old man in his room; 
last door at the end of the passage! " He did not 
even look up. 

I went along the passage. The chattering of 
the steel teeth of typewriters came from many an 
open door, and I caught peeps of disorderly rooms, 
and men, minus coat and vest, leaning back in big 
chairs dictating to women typists. I saw that last 
door. It was closed, and I hesitated. 

Noticing a young fellow like a clerk, I ap- 



66 AMERICA AT WORK. 

proached him. " How can I see the Secretary? " I 
asked. 

He answered, " I don't know whether the old man 
is in. But go right in there; that's his room." I 
went to the door and tapped. No answer. I knocked 
loud. 

" Go right in, didn't I tell you! " said the clerk 
with a snap. 

I went right in. There was the Secretary of 
State for a great American Department, sitting at 
his table. He looked up, and I mumbled some sort 
of apology for trespassing. 

"Sit down!" 

I pushed forward my card, and also presented 
my letter of introduction. He took both, but looked 
at neither. I saw a huge interrogation in each of 
his eyes. Those eyes were saying, " What do you 
want ? " I told him in three short sentences. 

Within a minute and a half we were on a busy 
talk. I wanted some particular statistics. He 
touched an electric bell. " Jim, fetch me Bulletin 
78." Then, before the man had gone, the Secretary 
turned to me and said, " I think there's something 
else that would be useful. Jim, bring 92 as well." 
I got the bulletins — and others before I left. 

Mr. Secretary appreciated what I wanted. There 
was no coldness, no hesitation, no formality. There 
was no superfluity of words. He was a business 
man. He talked freely and openly. 

Yet I don't think he knew my name till, at the end 
of an hour, after he had provided me with a bundle 
of Government publications, he looked at my card, 



WAYS THEY HAYE IN WASHINGTON. 67 

so that he might send them by messenger to the 
hotel. 

" If you want to know anything more, come right 
in; I'm here most any da}^ from ten till five," were 
his parting words. 

Knowing something of the barriers in British 
Government offices, this almost open house in the 
American Government Departments surprised me. 

Anybody can go in and see anybody. That is 
the American idea. To hang about a waiting-room, 
dependent on another man's convenience, would be 
to admit inequality. 

The " Walk right in " habit has its drawbacks, 
but it is an acknowledgment of equality, a shoulder- 
ing of useless Frenchy scraping — as I heard a man 
describe the agreeable little mutual courtesies of 
European life — and, what is important, it eaves a 
lot of time. 

"I would like to have a look round your depart- 
ment," I said to the chief of a State office. '* All 
right; go just where you like; nobody will stop 
you." 

To the head of another department I remarked, 
** Don't you sometimes find a lot of your time wasted 
by talkative cranks ? " 

He smiled. " No. These are Government offices, 
and every American who wants to know anything 
can come right in here. It doesn't take me a minute 
to find out whether a man is honestly seeking in- 
formation. If he is, I'm glad to see him, and just 
help him as far as I can, and if I haven't the 
information, tell him where he can get it. As to 



68 AMERICA AT WORK. 

the dawdling, silly people — oh, yes, we've got those 
kind in the States — why, I guess it doesn't take long 
before they're out in the passage." 

The scope of my investigations was confined to 
those departments which had to do with trade and 
work — to the Census Office, which prepares statistics 
about everything; to the Agricultural Department, 
with its wonderful experimental stations dotted over 
the land; to the Department of Labour, which 
watches everything affecting workmen; and to the 
Patent Office. 

And the sum of my impressions came to this — 
that every man in the various departments was bub- 
bling with enthusiasm about the work he had in 
hand. 

I acquired the habit, which no man would think 
of in London, of dropping into a Government office 
and getting into chat with any of the officials. 
The moment it was seen I was not an idling tourist, 
the remark usually was, *' Come right in and sit 
down." Never was there once any " Now you must 
excuse me, for I'm busy." 

An interesting place was the Department of 
Labour. We have nothing like it in our own 
country. Our Board of Trade is not at all like it. 
The Board of Trade is administrative. The duty of 
the Department of Labour is to collect informa- 
tion about work, wages, and industrial conditions 
in all parts of the world, and at intervals — in 
a really bright and attractive way, so different 
from our own stodgy " Labour Gazette " — to issue 
publications. 



WAYS THEY HAVE IN WASHINGTON. 69 

It was only in 1885 that the Bureau of Labour, 
within the Department of the Interior, came into 
existence. In 1888, however, it was a fully fledged 
department, with independent functions, though the 
chief, the Commissioner of Labour, Mr. Carrol D. 
Wright, was given no place in the Cabinet. 

And here, by way of an aside, let me state that 
Mr. Wright is the only high officer of the American 
Government who has maintained his position 
through varying and successive administrations. 
Republican and Democratic. He was a patent 
lawyer in Boston, and was a member of the 
Massachusetts State Legislature. When Massa- 
chusetts created a Bureau of Labour, in 1869, the 
first office of the kind in the world, he became Com- 
missioner, and he stepped to the higher office when 
a Government department was opened. All America 
recognises Mr. Wright as the authority on labour 
questions, and though it is customary on the election 
of a new President to sweep out nearly all the old 
hands to make room for the friends of the President, 
no President has said " Go " to Carrol D. Wright. 
Besides the Government Department, thirty-one 
States have followed the example of Massachusetts 
in having Bureaus of Labour to themselves. 

Congress gives instructions to the Department to 
issue annual reports on particular subjects. Staffs 
of men work for months, even years, gaining in- 
formation. It is all sifted. Nothing of a hearsay 
character is used. The report only goes out when 
everything in it has been verified. 

Here are some of the subjects that have been 



70 AMERICA AT WORK. 

dealt with in volume form: — Industrial depressions; 
the relations between convict and other labour, 
especially in regard to the cost of production; 
strikes and lock-outs; everything about working 
women in twenty-two of the larger cities of the 
United States, their wages, hours, health, their 
moral and sanitary surroundings; the railroad 
labour of the country; the cost of producing steel 
and iron products and textiles and glass in America 
and other countries (a report which took three and a 
half years to complete, as the cost of living in 
16,000 families had to be inquired into) ; industrial 
education in other countries, dealing with the 
kindergarten in relation to manual training, manual 
training in conjunction with book work, trade 
instruction in reformatories, and the effect of train- 
ing on the individual; building and loan societies; 
the occupations and earnings of women and chil- 
dren and men, and the relative efficiency of women 
and children and men engaged in the same occupa- 
tion ; comparison of earnings in regard to efficiency, 
hours, and the reasons for employing women and 
children ; the economic aspect of the liquor problem ; 
the relative cost of hand and machine labour ; private 
and municipal ownership; the wages and hours of 
labour in all principal trades in all the principal 
countries of the world. And a great deal more of 
striking, useful, and well-sifted information. 

In addition to these voluminous reports, contain- 
ing facts acquired on the spot, there is the bi-monthly 
" Bulletin." This always contains two or three 
articles on topical subjects, the original investiga- 



WAYS THEY HAVE IN WASHINGTON. 71 

tions of the agents and experts of the Department; 
a digest of all the reports issued by State Bureaus 
throughout the country, a digest of foreign labour 
reports, and the reproduction of new laws affecting 
working people, and the decisions of Courts inter- 
preting laws involving the relationship of employer 
and wage-earner. 

At first the Department tried to gather its in- 
formation through, the post. This failed. Now it is 
obtained by special agents. Some employers decline 
to give information, but as the Department does not 
publish names, many firms willingly allow all their 
books to be inspected by the agents. 

The great aim is to focus all things, to get their 
relationship, to state them clearly, and as far as 
possible avoid the attitude of arguing. 

Let me mention haphazard a few of the subjects 
authoritatively dealt with in these bi-monthly 
Bulletins. There are a good many articles on negro 
labour on farms and in workshops. There are 
articles on co-operative distribution; on the public 
baths of Europe; on the municipal restaurant at 
Grenoble, France; on boarding homes for working 
women ; on pawnbroking in Europe and the United 
States; on the labour laws of England; on the 
British Workmen's Compensation Act and its opera- 
tion ; on the trend of w^ages ; on railway labour in all 
parts of the world. 

I have never seen such admirable articles 
anywhere, except in the leading English monthly 
reviews, and the Labour Department publications 
have the advantage of never being theoretical, but 



72 AMERICA AT WORK. 

always practical. And there is no paying of half 
a dollar for the issue. Any American has the right 
to send a post-card : *' I want Bulletin 23, which has 
an article on the production of paper and pulp in 
the United States," and it is sent to him without any 
charge. 

Further, every American is entitled to write and 
ask the Department about any question on earth he 
is interested in — the payment of Scotch fisher girls ; 
why it is poor people have more children than rich 
people; at the present increase of wages, how long 
will it be before everj^body in America will have 
$1,000 a year (these were questions actually put while 
I was in the office) ; what restrictions are there on 
Americans going to South Africa? and a whole 
stream of inquiries, arriving by the hundred every 
day from senators, and from ignorant, freshly 
arrived, illiterate Polish Jews; sometimes very sug- 
gestive questions, sometimes sheer stupidity, but all 
entitled to an answer. 

Here then is a great educational department for 
every American who wants to know things about 
industry. Everything published in the civilised 
world on labour matters is docketed and pigeon- 
holed. By an elaborate system of indexing, a finger 
can be placed on everything that has been written 
on a particular subject for the last fifteen or sixteen 
years. The gist of articles in foreign tongues is 
translated. Every man in the department is a 
specialist. And if Silas K. Cornstalk, of Topeka, 
Kansas, wants to know how many more grains of 
corn sprout on an American ear of wheat than on 



WAYS THEY HAVE IN WASHINGTON. 73 

an English, there is somebody who will tell him, or 
find out, or at any rate refer him to the man who 
makes such information his speciality. 

Once the Labour Department made an excursion 
from its obvious work. It prepared a report on 
marriage and divorce, which meant investigation in 
more than 2,600 courts in the United States having 
divorce jurisdiction. The propriety of this inquiry 
was sometimes condemned. But, says Mr. Carrol 
D. Wright, " if there is any subject in which labour 
should be actively interested, and which concerns 
the happiness of the working man, it is the sacred- 
ness and the permanency of home relations. To 
my mind the report on marriage and divorce is as 
thoroughly essential to labour in all its interests as 
any reports upon wages or cost of living." 

The Department puts a wide and liberal inter- 
pretation on the duties assigned it by Congress. 
To inquire into the moral as well as the material 
prosperity of the nation it considers well within its 
functions. 

Congress approves that attitude. At first it only 
gave £5,000 a year to the work; now it gives 
£15,000, and this is exclusive of printing and many 
other expenses. The Post Office carries free the 
bulletins and letters, whether it be a mechanics' 
club, or a trade union organisation, or a curious 
inquirer. 

" We're here to provide information. Walk right 
in and get it!" is what the American Labour De- 
partment says to Americans. 

The Department makes no recommendations to 



74 AMERICA AT WORK. 

Congress. Its work is to demonstrate, to elucidate, 
to strike comparisons, and leave others to draw con- 
clusions. 

Indeed, it would be useless to suggest. Congress 
does not make laws relating to conditions of labour. 
That is done by the many State Legislatures, and 
their laws are as varied as those of Great Britain 
and Germany. Besides, the United States is prac- 
tically a Continent, with different conditions of 
labour, different workers, white in the north and 
negro in the south; and though once or twice there 
has been urging for consolidation of laws, this is not 
likely to be for many generations, because it is recog- 
nised that no rules can be made applicable to every 
corner of the States. The only consolidation there is 
likely to be within the near future is in regard to 
the laws on marriage and divorce. 

I admit I was vastly impressed with the educa- 
tional value of the Department of Labour. There is 
no barrier of officialism to restrain inquiry. There 
is the office, and you can walk in and get what you 
want, and if you don't live in Washington you can 
write. 

Often, when I have gone rambling through a 
bulky British Blue Book, scissors in hand, getting 
weary of delving among dreariness, on the search for 
diamonds of interest, I have sighed " Oh that the 
British Government would appoint some one who 
understands the relative public value of things to 
prepare digests." That is what the Labour Depart- 
ment of America does, and that is what every De- 
partment of the United States Government docs in 



WAYS THEY HAVE IN WASHINGTON. 75 

the hundreds of thousands of Bulletins issued every 
year. 

In England a Department does not do a thing 

till there is a public demand, and then tardily. In 
America, the heads of Departments, bristling with 
enthusiasm, exclaim, " That's a good proposition, 
and we'll do it." Thereby popular interest is created, 
popular fancy is touched. 

America has no insular prejudices. It drains 
the world for ideas, picks the best, and adapts them. 
All this adaptability, plus enthusiasm, is at the 
bottom of American prosperity to-day. 



CHAPTER VII. 

COMMERCIAL TRAINING IN PHILADELPHIA. 

fij^ILADELPHIA is the joke-town of America. 
JL If a New Yorker wants to touch the depth of 

dulness he says, " as slow as Philadelphia." It 
is currently reported in other cities that grass grows 
in the streets of Philadelphia. When a Philadel- 
phian arrives in New York he is asked if he has 
come by the canal boat. They say that if a man 
falls off a six-storey building in the Quaker City he 
comes down so slowly he doesn't hurt himself. 

Philadelphia, however, is the most English town 
in America. It is the only town where there are 
half a dozen cricket clubs. 

The Chicago man will tell you how many pigs 
are killed in a minute at Armour's, and show you 
bonds worth a couple of millions. The Philadelphian 
will tell you of the English town from which his 
great-grandfather came; how there is more family 
life in his city than in any other American 
town. He will smile at the good things of life 
the dollar chasers of New York and Chicago miss, 
and he will tell you there is a refined society in 
Philadelphia which cannot be entered by the mere 
money-maker. 

Philadelphia is truly the Quaker City. The 
memory of William Penn is fresh and effective. I 



TRAINING IN PHILADELPHIA. 77 

have taken an evening saunter through some of the 
streets, and the houses and surroundings have re- 
minded me of the sweet quietude of an English 
cathedral town. 

Great things are being done in the matter of in- 
struction. Indeed, while we in England are nibbling 
at the cherry of technical instruction, America has 
gobbled it. The young American wants to know, 
not, as I have found by many conversations, for any 
love of learning, but because to him knowledge in 
these days means dollars and cents. 

I select Philadelphia as an example of what is 
being done in technical and commercial education, 
not because it is a show place, but rather because it 
is a slow place, and more than any other town 
approximates to English conditions. Further, be- 
cause it is the city in which America first realised 
that education can turn out dollars as well as dons. 
The Pennsylvani an Museum and School of Industrial 
Art were the outcome of the Centennial Exhibition 
at Philadelphia, in 1876. That exhibition opened 
American eyes to what Europe was doing. And 
when American eyes are opened it is to imitate, and 
not merely to admire. 

Within a couple of years there had also been 
established in Philadelphia a School of Design. 
Then came the foundation of the Textile School, and 
while the old weavers in the city suburbs are 
Englishmen, the new ones are Americans. 

Philadelphia is the centre of the carpet industry 
in the States. Forty-five per cent, of American- 
made carpets are turned out from Philadelphian 



78 AMERICA AT WORK. 

mills. Old-World names are attached to them. 
Wiltons are made by men who don't know where 
Wilton is; Persian rugs are shown in colours and 
designs that would make that old bibulous blas- 
phemer, Omar Khayyam, whirl in his grave. But 
the American likes " swagger " names. He prefers 
to call a barber's shop a tonsorial parlour. He sells 
you Mogul brand Egyptian cigarettes made of 
Turkish tobacco! He sees nothing whimsically in- 
congruous in the description. 

When once Philadelphia was touched with the 
fever of technical training, the desire soon became 
absorbing. There sprang up the Spring Garden 
Institute for the teaching of mechanics. As an 
outcome of the work done by the Spring Garden 
Institute, manual training has been adopted by 
nearly all the large States. There blossomed the 
Temple College and the Williamson Free School of 
Trades. The Girard College added manual training 
to its studies. 

Other cities do bigger things. New York, St. 
Louis, Pittsburg, and Chicago have manual training 
classes, accomplishing a gigantic work. At Scran- 
ton, Pennsylvania, is a Correspondence School, 
which has an average of 10,000 pupils in all parts 
of America, but chiefly in the outlying, detached 
districts, who are being taught engineering by cor- 
respondence. Manual training schools flourish 
everywhere, not so much to teach trades as to give 
general instruction in the principles of various 
trades. The whole trend of instruction in the public 
schools, in what we call the secondary schools, and 




I 

Q. 

_l 
UJ 
Q 
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_J 

I 
Q. 



TRAINING IN PHILADELPHIA. 79 

in the universities, is not to give academic studies, 
but something practical, that will be useful in a com- 
mercial career. 

There is a great man in the United States, 
and his name is Pierpont Morgan. He is the ideal 
ever in front of American youth. I never missed 
an opportunity of talking with college lads, most of 
them breezy, unconventional, witful. The reason 
why they were so keen was always — "I want to 
make money ; I guess if all goes well I'll be as rich 
as Morgan some day." This materialism shows how 
the young American is getting ready to take his 
father's place in the mighty struggle to wrest the 
world's commerce from Great Britain. 

" You have no conscience," I said half jokingly 
to an American who had been telling me of some 
of his achievements. " Maybe," he replied with a 
smile, " but I have two million dollars invested in 
railways." 

In Philadelphia I visited the Pennsylvania 
University and several of the training schools. I 
have seen as good, and better, in England, but never 
such a congregation of them. Where America has 
the advantage is in the tremendous enthusiasm and 
eagerness of the pupils. In English technical schools 
the attendance is usually scant, when you think of 
the numbers who might attend. In America the 
technical schools, day and evening classes, are 
always crowded, and boys and girls, men and 
women, clamour for admission. 

Pennsylvania University may be compared with 
an}^ of our universities outside Oxford and Cam- 



80 AMERICA AT WORK. 

bridge — Yorkshire, Owens, Durham, Birmingham, 
Edinburgh, St. Andrews, Glasgow. It is pleasantly 
situated, but some of the twenty-nine buildings are 
too new to suggest scholastic repose. There are 
dormitories for 500 students, and there are plenty 
of cheap lodgings in the neighbourhood. The 
average cost to a better-class student, including 
everything, is not more than £150 a year ; often very 
much less. 

There are the ordinary academic studies that a 
pupil must go through. But it is altogether against 
the American idea to send a youth from the uni- 
versity at the age of twenty-one with little beyond 
what is summed up in the phrase '* book-learning." 
A young man or young woman — and at Pennsyl- 
vania University there is no limitation to one sex — 
is expected to undergo some sort of practical train- 
ing. The student selects. He may take courses 
at the Wharton School, and there be taught modern 
business practices; he may turn to mechanical or 
electrical engineering ; he may want to study law, or 
medicine, or hygiene; he may want to go into the 
department of veterinary medicine ; he may think a 
fortune is to be found in dentistry, or in architecture, 
or in music ; a girl may want to go into the training 
school for nurses. 

A young fellow, therefore, when he leaves the 
University and goes to his father's business, is some- 
thing different from a bundle of 'varsity affectations. 
There are no sons of county families, no landed class. 
Every lad's father is in business; he is going into 
business himself ; he wants to be so equipped that he 




I X 

O Q- 

UJ 

I- z 



TRAINING IN PHILADELPHIA. 81 

may show how things should be done the first day 
he walks through his father's shop. 

As the machine, and not the man, is the great 
producer nowadays, Pennsylvania University is 
strong in its classes for mechanics. There are 
150 . students in the mechanical department, and 
three times as many names on the books waiting 
admission. 

A student who intends to become an engineer cuts 
down the ordinary scholastic course to the minimum. 
But if he does go in for engineering he is obliged 
also to take mathematics, physics, and chemistry. 
The first year is for theory ; the second year is for 
demonstration on the board; that is, every student 
stands before a blackboard and works out problems 
given by the instructor ; the third year is spent in 
the workshops, where it is the rule not to give in- 
struction, but to let the fellows smash the machinery, 
as often happens, in finding ou.t things for them- 
selves. In couples, rarely more, they are sent to 
visit big engineering w^orks, such as Baldwin's. 
They are not shown round. They are put into a 
shop ; they have to use their own wits, and they are 
expected to make reports on what they see. Before 
a student can get a degree he must work out a thesis, 
that is, he must, of his own selection, fix upon one 
of the unsolved problems in mechanics, make 
experiments, and provide a theory which will 
prove to the professors, whether he be right or 
wrong, that, at any rate, he has a good grasp of 
his subject. 

There are lots of young men who have no well- 

G 



82 AMERICA AT WORK. 

to-do parents to pay their fees at the university. 
Yet, if they have made up their minds to get a 
university training, they have it. They save enough 
to pay the fees, which are about £60 a year. At 
night they do odd clerical work. In the vacation 
months they get jobs with firms as labourers. I 
heard of a young fellow studying medicine who 
earned money in the vacation as a bath-chair man 
at Atlantic City. Another, hard pushed, went to 
some big building operations where several hundred 
men were employed, and obtained the right to 
go all over the place selling iced drinks to the 
workers.* 

Special provision is made for mechanics who, 
feeling they have risen as high in their particular 
shop as their knowledge will carry them, want 
wider instruction. They make application to a 
special board of professors, who inquire into the 
circumstances, and possibly reduce the fees by half, 
and allow them to leave out the purely academic 
course. 

Lads who have gone through a university train- 
ing successfully are snapped up at once by em- 
ployers. It is not an unusual thing for the chief of 
a great manufacturing firm to write to the head of 

* The same takes place at all universities. At Harvard 
I was told that many students earn tuition fees by waiting 
on fellow students. It is common for students to be car 
conductors. I heard of one who was an undertaker's assistant. 
One of the most successful students last year entered Harvard 
with 45 cents. A raonied youth who spent £4,000 the first 
year was cut by his fellows as a " cheap sport." 



TRAINING IN PHILADELPHIA. 83 

the mechanical department of a university, ** I will 
take fifty of your students in mechanics who finish 
their course this year." 

Most of the courses are for four years. A youth, 
however, who has had two years in the office of a 
practising architect may take up a two-year course 
in architecture. It is possible to have a three-years' 
course in interior decoration. If a lad is a graduate 
of a normal school he may come to Pennsylvania 
and study banking. The Wharton School of Finance 
and Economy is an endowment to provide (1) " an 
adequate education in the principles underlying 
successful civic government " ; (2) "a training suit- 
able for those who intend to engage in business or to 
undertake the management of property." 

An important department of the university is the 
Dental School, to prepare young men to follow 
dentistry as a profession. I saw an array of the 
latest American dental equipment. The operating 
rooms are fitted up like private offices; the lecture 
amphitheatre seats 550. 

The university is studded with special prizes, 
from a shelf of books for being a good athlete and 
good scholar combined, to £13 for the best speaker, 
in a debate on recent development in railway con- 
solidation, and £25 for the best essay on compulsory 
voting. Academic studies are made subsidiary to 
practical studies. Pennsylvania University, there- 
fore, is an example — and I describe it not to give 
it undue prominence, but simply as an example- — 
of how America is turning out its sons to take a 
part in commerce. 



84 AMERICA AT WORK. 

An institution, typical of thousands throughout 
America, is the Philadelphia Spring Garden Insti- 
tute. It grew out of voluntary eifort, but has an 
endowment fund of about £30,000. From a little 
drawing school it has become the pioneer of technical 
education schools in the United States. To-day close 
upon 6,000 pupils attend its classes. 

The Institute maintains day schools in three 
distinct departments— art, mechanical, and elec- 
trical; and each department has night classes for 
apprentices, boys learning trades, and boys and girls 
still attending the public schools. The day schools 
are for people of some leisure of both sexes, and 
those who desire a thorough artistic or mechanical 
training before entering a trade or profession. In 
the night schools the fees of pupils are practically 
nominal. 

Step into the mechanical school, and you will see 
crowds of young men and women spending eight 
hours a day at work ; and the Spring Gardens 
management reckon that in nine months a pupil is 
as far advanced as at the end of three years in a 
manual training school. No trade is taught. What 
is provided is instruction in metal and wood 
work. The pupils start with chipping and filing, 
and they progress to tool-making and machine 
construction. 

The night schools are packed. The electrical 
department is the more popular. Take the first 
year of instruction. A particular class meets two 
nights a week — one evening for a lecture and the 
other for a night in the laboratory. Each lecture, 



TRAINING IN PHILADELPHIA. 85 

illustrated by experiments, electrical apparatus, and 
lantern slides, is followed by an evening in the labor- 
atory, wliere the student, individually, repeats for 
himself the experiments previously made. In the 
second year the principles learned in the first are ap- 
plied practically to commercial electrical machinery, 
and systems of electrical power distribution. The 
third year is devoted to throwing the pupil largely on 
his own responsibility. The class work together as a 
whole, but pairs of students are put on a different 
test, and the pairs are changed from test to test, 
night after night, during the term. 

What forcibly struck me in my investigations 
was not the teaching material or the equipment, but 
the sterling enthusiasm of the pupils. 

There was no nervousness, no fear of doing the 
wrong thing. I don't believe the American lad is 
more intelligent than his British cousin; but he is 
certainly three times as alert. While the British 
lad stops to reason a thing out, the American lad, 
who has greater intuitive than reasoning faculties, 
makes a shot, hit or miss. Put something new before 
a British boy, and he will hesitate and say he has 
never attempted that before. Ask an Americaji 
boy if he can do a thing, and he answers you with 
the question " Why not? " He has such confidence 
in himself that four times out of five he does it. His 
suave explanation why he missed the fifth time 
demonstrates also that he is not altogether unblessed 
with the inventive faculty. 

These technical classes have made the appren- 
ticeship system, such as we have in England, abso- 



86 AMEKICA AT WORK. 

lutely impossible. There is apprenticeship, but it 
is elastic. For many years the managers of 
Baldwin's Locomotive Works have been trying to 
find a satisfactory apprenticeship scheme. They 
have three classes, and these, I think, are worthy of 
explanation. 

In the first class, then, they will accept lads of 
seventeen years, and bind them for four years, on 
the distinct understanding the apprentices attend 
night schools during the first three years, learning 
algebra and geometry in the first, and mechanical 
drawing in the second and third years. These 
apprentices start with a wage of 2Jd. an hour, and 
end with 5Jd. an hour. Lads who can become 
apprenticed under the second class must have had 
an advanced grammar school or high school train- 
ing, including a mathematical course. The inden- 
tures are for three years, and the apprentices must 
attend night schools for two years. In this class 
wages start at 3J-d. an hour and rise to 7Jd. The 
third-class indenture is in the form of an agreement 
made with persons twenty-one years of age or over, 
who are graduates of colleges, technical schools, or 
scientific colleges, and who, having taken courses 
covering the higher mathematics and the natural 
sciences, desire instruction in practical shop work. 
Usually the agreement is for two years. The wages 
start at 6Jd. an hour, and rise each six months, 
until in the latter half of the second year they are 
lOd. an hour. 

In England there is something of a mild con- 
tempt for the mechanic suckled in a technical school. 



TRAINING IN PHILADELPHIA. 87 

In America, on the other hand, he is believed in, 
sought after, encouraged, and if he proves his grit 
there is no prejudice, on the score of youth, against 
his having, at the age of twenty-four, the control 
of a thousand men. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

SOME PHASES OF COMMERCIAL LIFE. 

YOU cannot generalise about America or its 
people. There is as much dissimilarity between 
a Chicago packer and a Virginia planter as 
between a Middlesbrough puddler and a don of 
Castile. To plunge into generalities is to kick up 
the dust of a hundred exceptions. 

In America, however, as I roamed about from 
one industrial centre to another, I did not speak to 
half-a-dozen men who had not their arms up to the 
elbows in dollar-making. And I found the business 
man carried all his personal goods in his shop 
window. That is, within the first ten minutes you 
see all his best points, unlike the Englishman, whose 
ice of reserve you can only thaw by cautious, gradual 
warmth. 

There is something of the good-natured big boy 
about the American money-maker. A man of fifty 
will talk to you on business in the bragging way a 
Yorkshire lad of twenty will talk about county 
cricket. He is first, and the rest nowhere. 

"Jolly " him: stroke him and scratch his head, 
and he will purr with appreciation. " Josh " him : 
chaff him about his characteristics, and let him 
imagine you are giggling in your sleeve, and his 
fur rises. He is as sensitive as a school girl is about 



PHASES OF COMMERCIAL LIFE. 89 

her freckles. He has a soft heart, and is sentiment 
personified in breeches. At the theatre, in the 
maudlin parts of a play, the Englishman becomes 
cynical and grins; the American cries. 

Of the sweetness of home life, such as English- 
men have, the American, I am convinced, knows 
comparatively little. Yet he loves his family. His 
womenfolk he places on a pedestal. And they 
are worthy of it. They are gentle, the sweetest 
women in the world — well read, cultured, good 
friends. He would rather have a family of girls 
than of boys. Girls give him a peep into the para* 
dise of refinement. 

His personal idea of comfort is too often a garish 
hotel, with a marble hall and an express elevator. 
That it is possible to be more comfortable in a small 
hotel than in a big one is beyond his range of com* 
prehension. If he can load his wife and daughters 
with jewels, give them what is called " a cottage at 
Newport," let them outshine everybody else in burn- 
ing dollars — to adopt the current phrase — by giving 
entertainments which cost most money, by having the 
price of his wines mentioned in the newspapers, he 
is not far from the acme of his ambition. New- 
port, to the American money-maker, is Eden. To 
the cultured American it is the most vulgar spot 
on earth. 

Bigness is too often a synonym in America for 
excellence. Everything must be big, whether it is 
the number of locomotives manufactured or the 
number of dollars made. 

Good-natured, easy-going, appreciative, hard- 



90 AMERICA AT WORK. 

working, the American business man is inclined to 
be distrustful. When I entered the United States 
I had to sign a declaration I was not going there 
under contract, that is, to work for an American firm. 
If that had been my object I would have been turned 
back. It is difficult for a German musician, hired 
possibly to play in some theatre orchestra, to enter 
the States. A short time ago some Nottingham 
lace-makers were taken over to start a lace-making 
industry near Chicago, and to instruct Americans in 
lace-making. They only entered after much bother. 

We all know the sixpence-in-the-slot scheme 
whereby we can get a pair of opera-glasses at the 
theatre. They have the same arrangement in 
America. But the opera-glasses are chained. You 
can go into hotels and find *' stolen from such-and- 
such an hotel " stamped on the spoons. It rather 
staggers a Briton when he sees the words inset in 
a cake of soap, *' Stolen from the Thingamy Hotel." 
The distrust, the suspicion, is irritating at first. But 
you get used to it in time. 

Disrobing him of various questionable qualities, 
the fact nevertheless remains that the American 
money-maker is the most assiduous business 
man on the face of the earth. You cannot shatter 
that mighty fact by six Hansard volumes of 
talk about his faults. Every ounce of him he puts 
into work. Precedents and usages he elbows on one 
side as he casts away an employee the instant that 
employee sinks below high level mark. 

The breakfast hour in America is usually seven, 
and by eight an employer has dictated all his 



PHASES OF COMMERCIAL LIFE. 91 

answers to letters. If you have an appointment with 
him for ten o'clock, he is engaged with somebody 
else if you turn up at ten minutes past. 

Go into an average English office with a proposi- 
tion, and you will be told the firm will think about 
it, and you may get a definite answer in a week. Go 
into an average American office, get straight down 
to business, and in three minutes you get a " No " 
or a " Yes." 

If a thing strikes an American as good, he will 
plunge at it for all it is worth. He will spend 
£10,000 on new machinery. Three months later, 
when the machinery has hardly got into working 
order, show him something better, that will do more 
work and at less money, and maybe cost £20,000! 
Then all the recent machinery is ripped down, and 
the still newer put up. It is reckless, but it pays. 
The American leans back in his chair and laughs 
at British manufacturers who only have new 
machinery when the old is worn out. 

After business hours the money-maker will go 
to his club. There you never hear talk about any- 
thing but money-making ; how much this business is 
worth ; how much that makes in a year ; how much 
somebody is spending in new plant ; how much a new 
machine will turn out, and how much it will save 
in the cost of production. You don't hear books 
discussed; you don't hear talk about golf; you are 
not told anecdotes about shooting; you don't even 
hear smoking-room stories. Every man talks about 
money-making. 

At first you are staggered; then you are dis- 



92 AMERICA AT WORK. 

gusted; then comes a great wonder at the energy, 
the vitality, the unwaning enthusiasm of it all. 

The dry, bracing atmosphere of America, that 
keeps a man at the full stretch of his powers, as a 
half bottle of champagne will do for a time, accounts 
for much. The American business man drinks 
neither spirits, beer, nor wine. One of the things 
that impressed me most when I have lunched with 
business men at their clubs has been the absence of 
alcohol. I have lunched in a room where there have 
been a hundred of the leading business men of a 
city, and I have not seen a glass of ale anywhere. 
Water has been the only drink. A man who takes 
spirits in the middle of the day is as much looked 
upon askance as a bank manager in England would 
be if he were constantly fuddled. 

" Yes," said a man to me, " there has been a 
wonderful change these last ten years. The strain 
of business is at times simply terrific. A man 
couldn't bear it if he drank. The head must be kept 
cool and clear, and that can't be if a man drinks. 
In such bitter, ruthless competition as exists to-day 
— not only America against the world, but among 
Americans against each other — we have to be water- 
drinkers in sheer self -protection." 

The phenomenon of industry in the United States, 
marked and vastly impressive, is that progress is 
chiefly along the line of quantity. In quantity 
America beats the world. When you come to quality 
Great Britain takes first place. 

Quantity is, of course, necessary to overcome the 
natural high rate of wages, indispensable in a 



PHASES OF COMMERCIAL LIFE. 93 

country of vast resources, and where anybody 
might become a landowner, and so work not for 
others, but for himself, which is not possible in 
the old countries. 

An impetus is given to everyone employing 
labour to minimise the cost of labour, and that is 
done by labour-saving machinery. The ability to 
start as farmers with no rent to pay sends wages up, 
and the high wage is the prime cause of American 
inventiveness in machinery. Half-used machinery is 
thrown aside for improved machinery, because every- 
body must adopt every plan to keep abreast of the 
competition. There is no machinery in the world 
equal to that found in the steel works of America. 
That is because American steel has had to pay high 
wages and yet fight British steel. 

But mark this. In those industries which are 
highly protected against foreign competition, such 
as the cotton and woollen trades, there is not the 
same wiHe-awakeness. It is protection that enables 
the high wages to be paid. Cotton and woollen manu- 
facturers have the American trade to themselves, and, 
compared with the steel trade, there has been nothing 
like the same thirst for labour-saving machinery. 

All the trend these last ten or twelve years has 
been simply and only in the direction of improving 
mechanical advantages whereby more yards length 
and more pounds weight can be produced than before. 

In England our technical schools do something 
towards the development of handicraftsmen. In 
America the handicraftsman holds a minor position. 
You can get a good new pair of boots in America, but 



94 AMERICA AT WORK. 

to have them neatly repaired is almost more than 
money will procure. It is better to buy a new 
pair. Handicraftsmen are too dear a luxury. The 
manufactured article is the tendency. 

Hardly anybody above the poorer classes wears 
ready-made clothes in England. Middle-class folk 
wear them in America. There are all sorts of sizes 
in America to suit all figures. Thus the tailoring 
craftsman is abolished. 

Eeal art in manufactured goods hardly exists. 
Patterns and styles are appropriated from abroad, 
altered, even improved, to suit the American fancy, 
and then put out as purely American productions. 
In New York I was struck with the excellent silver 
work everywhere. Inquiry, however, revealed that 
nearly all the workmen were imported. When I 
pressed my inquiry further as to whether the rising 
generation would not produce silversmiths, I was 
told, " No, because boys won't learn craftsmanship.' 

I saw charming pottery made at Trenton, in New 
Jersey. But the makers were from Staffordshire. 
What the visitor to the English pottery district 
notices is that every pottery town has its art schools. 
Trenton has no art school. 

It is not that Americans lack the taste to produce 
fine work. It is because manufacturers prefer to 
take English or French patterns, and produce 
articles by machinery in enormous quantities. 
Quantity, at a cut price, is the ideal. 

In the arts no country is doing itself so great an 
injustice as America. The people do not yet ap- 
preciate, but will soon, that the wave of prosperity. 



PHASES OF COMMERCIAL LIFE. 95 

of which they are so proud, instead of enlightening 
them in the noblest sense, has a tendency to crush 
out of their souls love of the best things in life, and 
causes them to take pride only in materialistic 
success. It is this lack that makes America an im- 
possible place for cultured Europeans. In Paris 
you will find young American artists, not only full 
of promise, but with rather more than a touch of 
genius in their work. They go home with apparently 
every prospect of a magnificent career. The career 
fails, not because the artistic instinct is gone, but 
because the materialism of America, the money- 
making atmosphere in which they are, willy-nilly, 
compelled to live, imperceptibly smothers the artistic 
sense that is in them. America's success, if you look 
below the surface, has a negative, a depressing, even 
an unwholesome side. 

The travelled American manufacturer knows all 
this, and the spirit towards training men to get 
quality as well as quantity is evidence that before 
long — for the American is nothing if not adaptable 
— the reproach I have made will largely have dis- 
appeared. 

What America suffers from, and what in many 
ways is holding her back, despite all the thumping 
of drums and blaring of trumpets that she is going 
forward, is that nine out of every ten American 
manufacturers have not travelled. They are men 
of native ability, shrewd to their eyebrows, but the 
majority lack culture, and they pooh-pooh culture 
as a thing that nowadays doesn't count. 

The American money-maker does not read books. 



96 AMERICA AT WORK. 

He has only time to glance at newspapers, and, un- 
fortunately, level-headedness is not the distinguish- 
ing quality of American newspapers. The British 
newspaper, like the British man, is prone to depre- 
ciate everything in its own country. The American 
newspaper, like the American man, is perpetually 
crowing and pluming. 

This revelry of optimism which just now is 
rampant in the United States gives, I fully recognise, 
the confidence that is half the battle in business. 
The American business man is confident that there 
is no man on earth so good as himself. He will tell 
you confidently that America invented everything. 
If you tell him America invented neither the railway 
engine nor the steamship, and that a multitude of 
inventions, which he, to give him credit, has ap- 
preciated and is using — which is not the case in 
England — are from the brains of British-born men, 
you stagger him. He has an idea we British folk 
are simply gropers in the darkness. 

See, then, the material that goes to build up the 
modern American money-maker. He has the good- 
natured arrogance of the self-made man with bulg- 
ing pockets. To make money is the first, the middle, 
and the last move in his rule of life. He knows that 
money gives him a special car on the railroad; it 
puts his picture in the one cent, yellow press; it 
provides his wife and daughters with the means to 
give costlier entertainments than their neighbours; 
it gives him power to crush other men. 

Now America has no traditions, in the broadest 
sense. There is no atmosphere of restraint. It is 



PHASES OF COMMERCIAL LIFE. 97 

the desire of the majority of young Americans, even 
though their fathers are rich, to get their shirt 
sleeves tucked up, plunge into business, and make 
their own pile. With their minds concentrated on 
this one object, and following it night and day, with 
nothing intervening, there is no wonder that many 
men under thirty have patches of grey hair over 
their temples. 

I began this chapter by saying that you cannot 
generalise about Americans; I end with the same 
remark. There are lofty-souled, refined Americans, 
to whom nothing I have written can possibly apply. 
But I have taken the business man, the money- 
maker, the man who tallis money, who judges 
everything by its money value, the man whom the 
British business man has to meet in the great 
struggle for the world's commerce. And, with all his 
shortcomings, he is no antagonist to disappear at a 
pooh-pooh! He is all strenuousness. Business is a 
battle, and he knows no mercy. He has a peck of 
faults. But he is scaling them, and he is never 
above learning — if knowledge means more money! 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE AMERICAN FARMER. 

THE American farmer as I have met him in the 
States of Hlinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, is a 
grand fellow. 

He is usually of Scotch or Scandinavian stock. 
The transplanting has made him long and weedy, 
so that his legs suggest they originally belonged to 
a taller man. 

He is elemental. He has no hesitation in telling 
you America is " God's own country," and that 
nobody ever grew so many bushels to the acre as 
he does himself. His knowledge of the world is 
rolled into the one sentence, that the United States is 
the boss nation of the earth, and that European 
countries are *' back numbers." 

His contempt for English farming ways is 
Homeric, but he thinks that good stuff in the way of 
men comes out of Scotland: he explains that his 
grandfather was Scotch. He brags in a way that is 
amusing. 

There is nothing of the " country bumpkin " about 
him. He has a native shrewdness and wit that is 
delightful, and he looks at you out of the corner of 
his eye. He has no old-fashioned notions. If he 
reads of a new agricultural implement that does 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 99 

wonders, " Gee-whish, I guess I'll have one," he says. 
He believes in advertisements. 

He works hard, and he works late. He sends his 
daughter to college, and when that young lady comes 
home with manners acquired in Boston, Massa- 
chusetts, and an ability to read French novels, he 
guesses " there ain't no girl so eddicated as she is." 

The corn crop of the United States in 1902 was 
a fifth greater than the corn crop for the entire world 
for the previous year. " Them's no second-hand 
facts," says the Nebraska farmer, who is raising 
twenty-two bushels of winter wheat to the acre, " but 
Goralmighty's truth. You ask Jimmy Wilson." 

Mr. James Wilson is a fine old character, once an 
Ayrshire lad, and now United States Minister of 
Agriculture. 

The American farmer believes in him because Mr. 
Wilson is a farmer himself. Just now he is putting 
his whole heart into a movement to get the public 
schools to embody a course of agriculture in their 
curriculum. If they will, he is prepared to provide 
them with packages of all kinds of seeds and small 
trees. He wants scholars to have little garden 
patches, so that they may see how things grow. 
In this way, he says, the first principles of agricul- 
ture can be taught, and the young man of the future 
will be able to realise there is a difference between 
beans and wheat other than that of prices as shown 
upon the blackboard of a broker's office, or in the 
market reports of the daily papers. Mr. Wilson 
believes that knowing how to raise cucumbers is 
quite as valuable as a knowledge of mathematics. 

LcfO.- 



100 AMERICA AT WORK. 

To sum up, he is practical, and is the head of a 
very practical Government Department. 

It took a lot of talk a few years back to get the 
British Department of Agriculture established. 
Indeed, Great Britain had no Minister of Agricul- 
ture until it had ceased to need one. England had 
then ended her career as an agricultural country. 

So I have never met a British farmer who has 
waxed enthusiastic about what the Department of 
Agriculture does for him. Neither, as a matter of 
fact, have I met an American enthusiastic over his 
Department of Agriculture. The reason is that the 
wonderful work the American Department has done 
since 1862 is accepted as a matter of course. 

The Department at Washington costs the citizens 
of the United States £100,000 a year. But most of 
the individual States also have Agricultural Col- 
leges, each of which gets a grant of £5,000 from the 
Government, a nice sum which the law says must 
be spent. The Government will not allow a State 
to hoard up money for fine buildings. If the State 
wants fine buildings it can raise them with its own 
money. If the $25,000 are not all spent the amount 
is deducted from the next year's grant. Accordingly 
every red cent disappears. 

These colleges are appreciated, especially in the 
middle States. At the Agricultural College of Min- 
nesota, for instance, there are between three and four 
thousand pupils. Each college has a huge tract of 
farming country, and all the farming done is on 
scientific principles, and specially suited to the 
district. 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 101 

In the more thickly populated, longer settled, 
eastern States agricultural colleges are least appreci- 
ated. The inclination among farmers' sons there 
is to forsake the soil and take to engineering, 
or surveying, or ordinary trade. Besides, the 
eastern farmer has some of the English farmer's 
contempt for scientific agriculture. It is the 
western man, the comparatively new settler, who 
has no prejudice in favour of what his grandfather 
did, but snaps at every new idea that will benefit 
him. 

I had a long talk with a broad-shouldered young 
Swede farmer in Nebraska. Putting the question to 
him casually, I found he had learnt a great deal 
from the pamphlets sent by the agricultural colleges 
to anybody for the asking. He told me he was inter- 
ested in the fattening of hogs, and the information 
given about the scientific feeding of animals had 
been invaluable. 

The teaching of the colleges has practically 
revolutionised the use of fertilisers. As to the value 
of the experimental stations there is no question. 
For instance, in Minnesota Scotch Fife wheat has 
been so improved by hybridising that where the 
average yield some years ago was sixteen bushels to 
the acre, the average yield now is forty bushels to 
the acre. 

To my mind the Agricultural Department of the 
United States is the most useful organisation in 
the world. It does not do all it sets out to accom- 
plish; but the machinery is there, and the en- 
thusiasm is there. Above all — and this is the point 



102 AMERICA AT WORK. 

— it is practical to the American. The results of 
experiments spell dollars. It is thorough. 

Within the Department is the Weather Bureau. 
Every day weather maps are published in the great 
centres. Forecasting has risen to the dignity of a 
science. From 365 centres 42,000 farms are, by 
means of the co-operation of the Post Office, which 
gives free delivery, supplied with forecasts. It is 
only a matter of development for thousands of other 
farms to be sent the information. 

There is the Bureau of Animal Industry. A tre- 
mendous work is in this section. All animals ex- 
ported or imported are examined; all diseases are 
investigated; a strict watch is kept on interstate 
live-stock traffic. 

The Bureau of Plant Industry was only created 
a year or so ago. It has now 200 workers finding 
out about disease in cotton, fruit, and timber, and 
breeding plants that are resistant to disease and 
better adapted to the changed conditions of agri- 
culture. 

We have had talk recently whether American or 
European clover seed is best. In 1901 experiments 
were started at Washington, and in 1902 experiments 
were being carried on in typical selected areas. 

The Bureau of Soils finds out such things as how 
the alkali problem in the bleached west may be 
solved, and has solved it by a splendid system of 
under-drainage. 

The Bureau of Chemistry investigates the com- 
position, nutritive value, and adulteration of food 
products ; a valuable work, much appreciated. 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 103 

Also there are divisions to make biological 
'surveys, to gather all publications on agriculture 
in America or elsewhere, to follow closely the foreign 
markets, to build " object lesson " or " sample " roads, 
to demonstrate the best way to make high-roads, 
to study forests, forest fires, forest grazing, forest 
products — indeed, everything that may be brought 
within the range of agriculture is systematically and 
thoroughly investigated. 

Ordinary agricultural societies with a show once 
a year and an odd paper read in odd months after 
a ** market ordinary " are not good enough for 
Silas Hayseed. 

He is " away up " beyond that. He has insti- 
tutes, and the moment the Agricultural Department 
sees the institute means business, then a useful thou- 
sand pounds or so is sent along. Last year two 
thousand institute gatherings were held in half a 
hundred States, and attended by half a million far- 
mers. These institutes are variously managed, some- 
times by officers of agricultural colleges, some- 
times by State or county officials, sometimes by a 
fusion of the lot. Anyway, there is no " that-is- 
hardly-in-our-department " talk. Everything is in 
everybody's department if it spells success. 

Yet some of these institutes are failures. Men 
get weary of hearing local men. They don't 
attend the meetings. But they turn up readily 
enough when a man of wide range experience comes 
along. 

" I want £1,000 to see if improvement can be 
made by having itinerant instructors," said Mr. 



104 AMERICA AT WORK. 

Wilson to Congress last year. And Congress gave 
the money. 

At Washington I went into a room and saw the 
work of distributing agricultural information. It 
was something difficult to realise. Last year nearly 
300,000 letters were received asking for information. 
Exactly 606 publications were issued, and eight 
millions of these were distributed. The Year Book, 
giving, in a cloth-bound volume of 840 pages, all the 
latest information, together with illustrated popular 
articles by experts, was distributed last year to the 
number of half a million. Each senator and repre- 
sentative is given 15,000 to circulate among his con- 
stituents. 

The appetite of the American farmer for informa- 
tion is prodigious. 

Englishmen — I have met dozens of them — go out 
West to farm. Some of them are successful, but 
no inconsiderable proportion of them are hopeless 
failures. The reason is they take what is called their 
Englishism with them. They cannot get rid of their 
home ways; they won't adapt themselves. So they 
write home that America is no good. The sensible 
Briton who says, " I'm in Nebraska now, and not 
in Norfolk," is not only a good farmer, but he is 
often better than the American. The reason is that 
at the outstart he has a better education, and while 
the American does often get hungry for the society 
of his fellows, the Briton will work on his ranch 
twenty miles from anywhere, and only " return to 
civilisation " two or three times a year to buy 
stores. 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 105 

It is said in England that no comparison can be 
made between British and American farms — that the 
latter are so huge. That is a mistake. 

The average size of the five million farms in the 
United States is 146 acres. They are enormously- 
bigger in the far West, but in the eastern States much 
smaller. I made inquiries what the American him- 
self thought the most workable-sized farm. Every- 
body agreed that big farms were unmanageable, and 
by no means so profitable as smaller farms. Two 
hundred and fifty acres is regarded as the ideal size 
of a farm, for then a man can control it himself and 
get a good profit. 

In harvesting time everybody works; even the 
daughter from college. Generally two gangs are 
employed, one by day and one by night, when lan- 
terns are used. 

You can go into a field and see three operations 
in full swing — the grain is cut ; it is threshed and 
separated ; ploughs are turning the stubble to next 
year's crop. Three thousand bushels are often 
threshed in a day at 3d. a bushel. On ordinary 
sized farms the latest machinery is to be found. 
Stand before an American machine, and you will see 
it receive the sheaf, break the band, take out the 
grain, load it in a waggon, weigh it, and send 
the straw to the stack top, and no hand has been 
near it. 

Much could be written about the mammoth 
farms of the West. There, however, the tendency is 
for the capitalist to step in and farm a territory 
with managers. There is Joseph Miller, first a bank 



106 AMERICA AT WORK. 

clerk, then a cowboy, and now, thirty years of age, 
owning 500,000 acres, having a fence of 150 miles, 
and with 8,000 acres sown with wheat. He raises 
double crops. After reaping mid-July wheat he 
raises a crop of Kaffir corn before autumn. There is 
Mr. Sherman, of Kansas, who rears cattle on a ranch 
seventeen miles long. He has one field of sixty-two 
square miles, on which he raises wheat. He works 
his men from seven to seven, with two hours off at 
mid-day. The average farm hand wages, besides 
board, is £4 a month and an extra £1 at harvest 
time. 

With no room for the wail of the English farmer, 
that bad times are always with him, the American 
farmer of the middle States nevertheless is not behind 
his cousin across the Atlantic in grumbling. If he 
is not an immigrant himself, he is the son of im- 
migrants who were discontented with their lot in 
the old countries, or they would never have set out 
for America. Discontent is in the bones of the 
American, and that is one of the innumerable 
reasons why, if you journey from Sandy Hook to 
the Golden Gate, you will rarely come across a man 
who strikes you as perfectly happy. Men are not 
satisfied with their lot: and this dissatisfaction, 
which has its uses in stirring a man to effort, is 
accountable for much of the nervousness of the 
American. 

The farmer accordingly has a full share of dis- 
content. Good crops do not invariably mean high 
prices, and the Missouri farmer has recognised that 
as quantity increases prices have a tendency to 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 107 

slump. Then he has a difficulty in getting his grain 
over the railways. 

I had a talk in Chicago with a railway official 
on this very point. He scoffed at the suggestion 
that farmers had anything to grumble at. He told 
me airily that last year's corn crop made 2,333,000 
car loads of 30 tons each; that with fifty cars in 
each train this loaded 46,600 trains, and that the 
railways were fully equipped to deal with this 
colossal traffic. It is, however, a notorious fact that 
often farmers have been obliged to burn their wheat 
because the railway companies have been quite 
unable to handle it, and because the market price 
was not worth the carriage. 

Much depends on the ability to ship rapidly, 
when the demand comes, because in grain the Ameri- 
can production is far in excess of home consumption. 
This has led to a marvellous development in grain 
elevators. Take a journey through Iowa and 
Nebraska, as I have done, and the elevators are 
always a distinguishing feature in the grain dis- 
tricts. The elevators have a capacity of anything 
from ten thousand to a hundred thousand bushels. 
By the side of some of the great lakes, where grain 
is transferred from railroad cars to vessels, elevators 
that will hold three million bushels of grain have 
been built. 

A train, laden with wheat, crawls to the elevator, 
a long spout is swung to a car and pushed among 
the wheat, and instantly the grain begins heaving 
into the building. A spout will elevate ten thousand 
bushels in an hour, and if there are a number of 



108 AMERICA AT WORK. 

receiving spouts, a train load of between thirty and 
forty cars, representing 15,000 tons, can be stowed 
in the elevator within an hour. The distributing 
spouts through which the grain is passed to the ship 
are very large, and can discharge 25,000 bushels 
an hour. These elevators are the finest things 
imaginable for storing surplus grain and having it 
ready for speedy shipment the instant there is a 
demand. 

But there are farmers who are not enthusiastic- 
ally favourable to the great storage of grain. The 
farmer finds the elevators financially profitable more 
to the grain speculator than to himself. The trusts 
which are nobbling every industry in America are 
beginning to nobble agriculture. A few years ago 
grain buyers tumbled over one another to purchase 
from the farmer. Now competition is disappearing. 
An association of buyers decides what price shall be 
paid, and the farmer must take that price. The 
syndicates have brought pressure on the railroads 
for special terms. Whenever there is a private 
dealer, and he won't sell out his business to them, 
they force up the price of grain till he can buy none, 
and he is ruined. 

All this has brought about a tide of emigration 
to the north-west and into Canada. Thousands of 
United States farmers are crossing the border into 
British territory because they find Canada is a 
magnificent grain-producing country, because they 
can get land comparatively cheap, and are not sub- 
jected to the squeezing by trusts and railway com- 
panies. A dread exists in the American mind that 



THE AMERICAN FARMER. 109 

the United States is going to lose much of its 
export wheat trade by the divergent trend towards 
Canada. 

Thousands of farmers in the middle States are 
accordingly selling their farms for £15 an acre, and 
moving to the north-west, where they can get uncul- 
tivated land for Is. 8d. an acre, or land under cul- 
tivation for £3 or £5 an acre, and most of the wheat 
raised is likely to be exported over Canadian lines. 
Close on 50,000 American farmers crossed into 
Canada last year. 

The mighty flood of Europeans into the eastern 
States where manufactories abound and where land 
is increasing in value is driving the farmer farther 
west towards the regions of Montana, and Nevada, 
and Idaho. There irrigation schemes are turning 
wildernesses into valleys of rustling corn. 

The American farmer, 'cute and hustling and 
alert though he is, is, however, all things considered, 
not so well off as the better-class English farmer, 
despite the chronic melancholy of the latter gentle- 
man. He has not the home comforts, nor the 
pleasant surroundings, nor does he get much real 
pleasure out of life. He is a good fellow, industrious, 
absolutely sober, but the cost of living and of every- 
thing else is very great. 

Also it must be remembered the American farmer 
does not come from the same class as the English or 
Scotch farmer. He is the English or Scotch labourer 
once or twice removed. But comparing his lot — 
a big farm, big machinery, big crops — with what 
his condition would have been in the old countries, 



no AMERICA AT WORK. 

he has on this point a mountain of things to count 
to his gain. Were I an English or a Scotch farm 
labourer, and had enough pluck to make the plunge, 
I would not hesitate a fortnight about going to 
America. 



CHAPTER X. 

AGRICULTURAL COLLEGES AND EXPERIMENT STATIONS. 

i BRITISH writer, dealing with American agri- 
Xjl. culture, finds himself in a topsy-turvy posi- 
tion. The United States has the finest 
scientific instruction in husbandry to be found any- 
where. That point is willingly conceded. But if 
you want good beef it is English you must eat, and 
not tasteless, sinewy American. If in an Ameri- 
can hotel your fancy runs to a nicely cooked chop, 
it will be mutton imported from England that will 
be placed before you. 

Here is an interesting paradox: In the land 
where the methods of agriculture are rather rule-of- 
thumb the finest beef and mutton in the world are 
raised; in the land where the farmers are college 
men the beef is stringy and the mutton woollen. 

Let a meat dealer go into the cold storage depart- 
ment of one of the huge packing firms at Chicago 
and want to buy the finest sides hanging there. 
He will probably find that impossible, for those 
sides are intended for the English market, where they 
will compete with home-grown English beef. Were 
I an American I should resent having the second 
best palmed upon me. The packer knows, however, 
that he can sell second quality to the American, but 
if he expects to get anything like a price he must 



112 AMERICA AT WORK. 

send the best he has to compete with the home- 
grown produce in the British market. 

There are several reasons why American meat 
falls behind British in quality. In England and 
Scotland cattle are daintily fed on meadow grass. 
It is sweet grass, full of nutriment, and the beef 
benefits. The American cattle are generally reared 
on big ranches where the grass is coarse. The fare 
produces coarse meat. This is so well recognised 
now that the practice is to bring cattle from the far 
West and let them pasture in the Mississippi Valley 
for a few weeks before being sent to the slaughter- 
house. This does something to remove the harsh- 
ness, but it does not produce beef such as you get in 
Old England. 

Therefore, on this subject of beef and mutton 
raising I begin by saying that the British result is 
the best, but that in scientific system the American 
holds first place. 

Scientific agriculture is, I know, regarded 
somewhat contemptuously by the sturdy, broad- 
shouldered, bright-cheeked, bluff-mannered Briton. 
Scientific farmers are good-naturedly regarded as 
cranks who generally lose their money. In America 
the modern farmer is often a college man. At 
twenty-one he is little more than a theorist, and 
the young Briton can ** chew him up " in rough- 
and-ready knowledge. Yet, admitting all this, I am 
convinced the American is on the right track, for 
in farming, as in engineering, the technically, 
scientifically trained man is certain to win. 

We have one or two private agricultural colleges 



COLLEGES AND STATIONS. 113 

in Great Britain, but that they are so few demon- 
strates a disinclination on the part of the young 
British farmer to be scientific. Our County Councils 
are doing a good work with peripatetic lecturers. But 
the instruction, as a rule, arouses only lukewarm 
interest. In America there is quite a rage to have 
scientific training. That word " scientific " has a 
pleasant jangle in American ears, and the tendency, 
indeed, is to harp too much on the word. Yet it is 
a tendency in the right direction. 

In writing this I do not lose sight of the fact 
that of recent years American manufacturing has 
taken a leading place in comparison with American 
agriculture. Again, in the United States, just as 
with us, young men set their eyes on the attractions 
of city life rather than following the calmer pursuits 
of the country. Further, the eastern farmer, with 
ideas handed down from his grandfather, who got 
them from England, is inclined to trot along in tlie 
old-fashioned, unscientific rut, and the Scot and 
the Swede and the Canadian met in the middle- 
west, full of energ}^ and resource, ready to buy any 
and every new machine that is advertised, blessed 
with abundant harvests, and disposed to be optim- 
ists though railroad companies and " trusts " and 
" corners " do frequently squeeze them, are ready 
to hustle along, adopting any useful ideas that come 
their way, but not placing too much store on scien- 
tific training, though they will say, " I guess I'll 
let my boy have just as fine a farming education 
as money can buy." 

So to-day every State in the Union has its agri- 
I 



114 AMERICA AT WORK. 

cultural college, and despite the inclination toward 
town life, all are well-filled with bright, eager, 
adaptive lads, keen on learning. In 1901 the colleges 
were attended by 42,104 students. The average age 
was twenty-one years four months. Each State main- 
tains its own college, but receives grants from the 
Government. Congress granted in 1901 close upon 
£140,000 to be spent in experiments alone. The 
experiment stations employ 688 persons in the work 
of administration and inquiry. The official state- 
ment shows that — 

" The number of officers engaged in the different lines 
of work is as follows : Directors 52, assistant and 
vice-directors 17, chemists 146, agriculturists 62, 
animal husbandmen 14, horticulturists 78, farm 
foremen 21, dairymen 31, botanists 49, ento- 
mologists 48, zoologists 6, veterinarians 29, 
meteorologists 14, biologists 7, physicists 5, 
geologists 5, mycologists and bacteriologists 21, 
irrigation engineers 8, in charge of sub-stations 
12, secretaries and treasurers 29, librarians 
11, and clerks and stenographers 43. There 
are also 77 persons classified under the 
head of * miscellaneous,' including superin- 
tendents of gardens, grounds, and building; 
apiarists; vegetable, plant, and animal patho- 
logists; herdsmen, poultrymen, etc. The 
activity and success of the stations in bringing 
the result of their work before the public are 
continuous. During the year they published 
445 annual reports and bulletins. These were 



COLLEGES AND STATIONS. 115 

supplied to over half a million addresses on 
the regular mailing lists. A larger number of 
stations than formerly supplemented their 
regular publications with more or less frequent 
issues of bulletins, bright and to the point, in- 
tended for newspaper publications, and most of 
the stations report a large and constantly in- 
creasing correspondence with farmers on a wide 
variety of topics." 

This gives some sort of an idea ho^v agricultural 
education is taken hold of in America. 

It was my good fortune, when in the Western 
States, to have much talk with young fellows who 
were taking up farming as a trade, as in the East 
I have seen young fellows at home take up engineer- 
ing with the same eagerness for knowledge, the same 
desire to be properly equipped, to be ready to do big 
things. I saw a wholesome anxiety to become 
adjusted to modern conditions, an acknowledgment 
that brains and machinery were the chief factors, 
and that the old-fashioned farmer must " go under," 
just as little workshops with antiquated machinery 
are " going under " by the hundred. 

Let me describe what is being done at Ames, 
Iowa, w^hich is the foremost agricultural college in 
the States, situate on wide prairie wavy with blue 
grass. Other States are doing an equally useful 
work, though not quite on such a large scale. An 
account of Ames, however, indicates what is also 
going on in other places. 

Iowa, the Hawkeye State, has rich bottom lands ; 



116 AMERICA AT WORK. 

it is a great feeding countr3% and the mission of the 
college is to experiment how most successfully the 
blue grass can be turned into beef and pork. There 
you see Herefords and Shorthorns and Aberdeen- 
Angus, all being fed experimentally. To turn out 
a bull, massive, with no patchy fat, but an ideal 
beef maker, is one of the ambitions of Ames. Over 
by a stream is a stretch of brome grass. Just now 
interest is taken in finding a good drought-resisting 
grass, for on these prairies at present there is nothing 
so good for dry weather as the orchard grass of the 
eastern States, or the salt grass of the Pacific sea- 
board. 

To the young man of Iowa there is no charge for 
tuition, even if he enters on a full four years' course. 
Outsiders, however, pay £6 a year, unless they are 
poor and worthy, and then the trustees make a ready 
remission. For living in the college buildings 
students really pay loss than the food costs the in- 
stitution. The expenses for residence in the main 
college building need not exceed £30 a year, includ- 
ing books, clothing, board, and all other items, and 
there are opportunities for earning a portion of this 
amount. 

Here, then — with the State Legislature and Con- 
gress pouring out money so long as it is profitably 
spent — the young men of Iowa have all opportunities 
of being educated in agriculture. 

The college farm contains 840 acres, and 
the buildings, magnificently equipped, cost over 
£100,000. Of the 840 acres I should mention that 
about 125 of them are college grounds, shrubberies, 



COLLEGES AJS[D STATIONS. 117 

plantations, botanical gardens, and the residences 
of instructors. 

The Government, apart from the Iowa State Legis- 
lature contribution, gives Ames £7,000 a year. The 
barns are really laboratories. The characteristics 
of all kinds of soil are investigated. In the Agri- 
cultural Hall is a stock room, where animals are 
brought, and there the teacher gives instruction. 
An experimental barn is constantly fitted up with the 
latest methods of stalls and ventilation. Tests are 
made with various fodders, grasses, and grains. 
Complete trials, embodying various crops and 
systems of agriculture, are made each year, and 
elaborate reports are issued, so that farmers generally 
may benefit by the information. 

Thus all crops grown by the college are for 
educational purposes. All the animals are fed by 
rule and system, and the preparation of different 
foods is studied so as to produce horses, cattle, sheep, 
and pigs to suit particular markets. A record is 
kept of the progress of every experiment, and this is 
free to the inspection of any student. The young 
fellows are given work that is educational and 
parallel with their studies. Poor students, by doing 
certain work in the morning and evening, can easily 
earn enough to pay for their board, and this without 
any loss of dignity. 

The whole trend of the teaching is to combine 
theoretical, scientific training with the practical, and 
at the same time to keep a very wide open eye on 
the result of experiments, which everybody is in- 
vited to dabble in, as it were, and no cold water is 



118 AMERICA AT WORK. 

thrown upon the scheme of any youth who is legiti- 
mately probing for knowledge. 

Early in 1902 the Iowa Agricultural College 
made a useful departure. Thinking it had some- 
thing to teach the practical men of the State, it gave 
for a fortnight a special course in stock and grain 
judging. Four hundred people, from every county 
in Iowa, and all the adjoining States, took advantage 
of this opportunity. University graduates worked 
alongside men from the rural schools. Everybody 
was on the alert to learn. From six o'clock in the 
morning till nine-thirty at night they were busy. 
The following general programme was carried out 
during the entire two weeks: From 6 till 7 a.m., 
and from 8 to 10 a.m., grain judging; from 10 to 
12 a.m., stock judging; from 1.30 to 4 p.m., stock 
judging; from 4 to 6 p.m., grain judging; from 
7.30 to 9.30 p.m., meeting in the college chapel, where 
various topics of general interest were discussed each 
night. 

Surely that was an interesting and suggestive 
sight : four hundred practical men, old grey-beard 
farmers and young graduates fresh from Yale going 
through a fortnight of scientific instruction on the 
judging of stock and grain! 

At present there are a hundred young men, drawn 
from all parts of the State, at Ames, receiving in- 
struction in dairying. Many of them are not the 
sons of agriculturists, but lads who take to dairy- 
ing as their brothers might take to dentistry, or gold 
mining, or the real estate business. That the educa- 
tion is appreciated is shown by the readiness with 



COLLEGES AND STATIONS. 119 

which nearly all the students get responsible and 
lucrative posts when their term of tuition is over. 

Some men can only give themselves a few weeks' 
special instruction ; others can afford a year. The 
college is elastic, adaptive — that useful characteristic 
of every institution in America — and so there is a 
choice of a four weeks' course, a sixteen weeks' 
course, and a one year course. The college creamery 
works all the 3''ear round. It has a practical and 
commercial side as well as a scientific and educa- 
tional side. During the summer season from fifteen 
to twenty-five thousand pounds of milk are taken in 
daily and manufactured into butter and cheese. 
The milk is purchased from farmers in the district. 
The student has all opportunities for becoming 
familiar with everything connected with the manage- 
ment of a commercial creamery. The herd of thirty 
or forty cows belonging to the college is milked and 
cared for by the students. Towards the end of the 
course, the year students spend part of their time 
in the laboratory doing original work. 

Here is a useful college providing a four-years' 
course for those who desire to run through the whole 
gamut of scientific agriculture, but adapting itself 
to the needs of all classes, even down to a fortnight 
of lecturing, and affording to young men who really 
want to learn, a chance of getting their tuition free 
and at the same time an opportunity to earn sufficient 
to board and clothe themselves. We have nothing 
like that in Great Britain. 

Eecollect, this is only one State agricultural 
college. Scattered throughout the United States are 



120 AMERICA AT WORK. 

62, all giving more or less similar instruction, but 
with an eye on the particular needs of the particular 
State in which the college is situated. 

When in California I was much interested in the 
growth of luscious fruit, and particularly in the 
vineyards, now carefully and scientifically culti- 
vated, so that the Pacific slopes may become a great 
wine-growing country. Once more all growers have 
to give thanks to the experiment station at Berkeley, 
not far from San Francisco. It is not the most 
satisfactorily placed, because the sea fogs that come 
trailing daily through the Golden Gate check the 
full summer heat necessary to ripen the grape. But 
in the orchards experiments are constantly being 
made with 636 varieties of fruit, including no fewer 
than 145 varieties of pears, 137 varieties of apple, 96 
varrieties of peaches, and 75 varieties of plums and 
prunes. 

When Berkeley College took grape culture in 
hand it was found that between three and four 
hundred varieties of grapes were in California Stat€, 
planted indiscriminately, with little regard to clim- 
atic adaptation. Wine making was haphazard, 
and a great quantity of ill-made unclassifiable wine 
was pitched on the market, the result being to make 
the flesh of the European wine drinker creep at the 
mention of the word *' Californian." 

There were the possibilities of a great industry. 
Yet the wines were poor because the growers were 
mainly folks from Europe who applied the practices 
of Germany, France, and Italy to the Pacific coast, 
and produced beverages more peculiar than attrac- 




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COLLEGES AND STATIONS. 121 

tive. The Berkeley experiment station set to work. 
The grapes and the soils were tested in the laboratory, 
the confused system of nomenclature was put 
straight, and bulletins of advice were issued which 
were of incalculable value to the grower, who till then 
was blindly stumbling along. 

Already there has been a vast change. The wines 
sent to Britain from Sacramento lack the bouquet of 
those from the neighbourhood of Mayence, but they 
are a vast improvement upon those of a dozen years 
ago. The professors at the experiment station see 
generations of work ahead before wine will be pro- 
duced to equal the best vintages of Europe. 

But the point I am interested in is, that this 
branch of agriculture, like every other, is being con- 
sidered, not haphazard, with improvement accident- 
ally discovered, but methodically, and the State and 
the Government spend money freely for no immediate 
direct result, but because they appreciate to the full 
the advantages of scientific research, not limited to 
a staff of professors, but open to any young man who 
wants knowledge. 

Let me refer to what is being done in another 
famous agricultural State, Ohio. Ten years ago the 
experiment station was removed from the vicinity of 
Columbus to the north-east quarter of the State in 
Wayne County. On one of the farms there has been 
instituted a series of experiments with fertilisers and 
manures. The land is first under-drained by tile 
drains laid three feet apart ; it is then divided into 
plots of one-tenth or one-twentieth acre each, and 
every third plot is left continuously unfertilised as 



122 AMERICA AT WORK. 

a standard, in order to correct as far as possible the 
inequalities which are often found in the most uni- 
form soils. About nine hundred plots are used in 
this work, which is bringing out the importance of 
phosphoric acid as the primary constituent of a fer- 
tiliser for the soils under test. 

The principal of the Ohio experiment station gave 
me a photograph showing the appearance of a part 
of the ninth crop of wheat in a rotation of maize, 
oats, wheat, clover, and timothy, the rotation cover- 
ing five years, and being so arranged that each crop 
is represented every season. In the foreground is a 
plot, continuously unfertilised, and yielding in 
1902 at the rate of lOJ bushels of wheat to the 
acre, and alongside is a plot — fertilised on each of 
the cereal crops of the rotation with nitrate of soda 
and muriate of potash, and receiving in each five- 
year period a total of 480 lb. of the former and 
260 lb. of the latter — yielding last year 13| bushels 
per acre. In the left background is a plot fertilised 
with the same quantity of muriate of potash as the 
other plot, but receiving a total of 320 lb. of acid 
phosphate instead of nitrate of soda. Its yield last 
year was 24| bushels to the acre. Then in the right 
background is another plot similarly fertilised with 
nitrate of soda and muriate of potash as the first, 
but, in addition, 320 lb. of acid phosphate. Its yield 
last year was 37J bushels of wheat per acre. 

The testing of varieties is another important line 
of the station work. From twenty to sixty varieties 
of each of the cereals, maize, oats, and wheat, and 
as many of potatoes, are grown each year in compara- 



COLLEGES AND STATIONS. 123 

tive test. In this work certain varieties of wheat 
have yielded three or four bushels per acre more in 
a ten-year average than others which are in general 
cultivation. 

All this, I fancy, will be rather dull reading to 
*' the man in the street," but they are facts which we 
cannot afford in this country to overlook. I have 
been in correspondence with twenty-five principals 
of colleges in all parts of the United States, and have 
accumulated a cartload of reports, fullof information 
directly useful to the agriculturist. There is a bundle 
of them on my table as I write. I glance at some of 
their titles: "Economical Production of Beef," "A 
Study of Pork Production," ** Fattening Lambs in 
Comparison with Yearlings," ** What Grains Lack 
as Poultry Foods," ** Originating Varieties of 
Wheat," '' The Digestibility of Potatoes," " The Care 
of Milk in the Home," and so on. 

But semi-technical though this chapter is, it will 
show to some extent at least how America is at work 
in the stem endeavour, constant and unrelaxing, to 
produce in agriculture both quality and quantity. 
At present America lags in quality. But it would 
be shutting eyes to the facts not to see that, with her 
sixty odd agricultural colleges and experiment 
stations. State supported, she is on the right road. 
In twenty years the improvement has been marvel- 
lous, and it is not for us to assume there will now 
be no more improvement. 



CHAPTER XI. 

RAILWAYS AND RAILWAY TRAVELLING. 

LET it be conceded that railway travelling in the 
' United States is more luxurious than it is in 
Great Britain. The coaches are roomy, are 
built on the Pullman pattern, and you can walk 
from one end of the train to the other. The 
woodwork is polished walnut, and is ribbed with 
gold. The upholstery is often bright green plush. 
There are enough bevel-edged mirrors to make a 
plain woman vain and an ugly man angry. 

If you pick your train you have the run of a 
library. You can be shaved by an attendant, and 
dictate j^our letters to a typewriter. In the smoking 
car you can lounge in saddle-bag chairs in the 
greatest comfort. 

That is the kind of train an American tells you 
about when he is travelling in a dirty, wheezy, third- 
class carriage in the suburbs of London at one-eighth 
of the money he pays in America. A quaint kink 
in his mind leads him to compare what is best in 
America with what he finds worst in England. 
When, however, you describe what is worst in 
America with what is best in England, he complains 
you are not fair. 

It is food for mirth to the American that we have 
first-, second-, and third-class carriages in England. 




A TYPICAL PULLMAN CAR. 



RAILWAYS AND RAILWAY TRAVELLING. 125 

*' Why, in God's own country we're all equal, and 
we have just one class," he says. 

He doesn't, however, say you start by paying 
nearly the equivalent of third-class, and if you want 
to travel well and express you must pay extra, and 
then probably another extra. 

Should you wish to travel first-class return, say 
from London to Aberdeen, you pay your money, get 
a ticket, deliver half, and stow the other half in your 
waistcoat pocket for coming back. If you want to 
travel what is practically first-class in America, say 
from New York to San Francisco and back again, 
you get a ticket a yard long, covered with rules and 
regulations, and it takes anything up to five minutes 
for the booking clerk to find it and scrawl hiero- 
glyphics, and look something up in a book. When 
you arrive in San Francisco you hand your ticket 
over to the railway officials, and get it back again a 
certain number of hours before you leave. 

But that ticket at two cents a mile will only take 
you by slow trains. If you want to travel by a 
fairly fast train, one that goes at forty miles an hour 
part of the way, and be content with twenty-five the 
rest, you must pay many dollars more. Indeed, there 
are no trains at all in America that will take you 
for the same price at the same speed as you can 
travel third-class from London to Edinburgh. 

Having paid your fare and the extra money to 
travel express, you then go to the Pullman office, 
show your ticket, and pay a sovereign or more a 
day for a seat in the Pullman car, including sleep- 
ing accommodation. Should you want to sleep in a 



126 AMERICA AT WORK. 

compartment — such as you get on an English train 
by paying 5s. over the first-class fare — it means the 
expenditure of several sovereigns. 

The system is confusing and dilatory. Nowhere, 
outside Russia, have I found the method of selling 
tickets so cumbersome as in America. 

If you are wise you book your baggage from your 
hotel through to your destination. In this matter 
we might copy the Americans. The railway com- 
panies give you a numbered check for each piece of 
baggage, and the baggage is only handed over, at 
the end of the journey, to the holder of the check. 
Thus is avoided that unseemly scramble for baggage 
on the platform when a terminus is reached, such 
as you may see a dozen times a day at King's Cross 
or Euston. 

The American plan is expensive, but it is worth 
it. You tell the porter at your New York hotel you 
are going to Chicago. Your baggage disappears, 
and the porter hands you numbered checks. On 
nearing Chicago a representative of one of the 
** express companies " bawls his way through the 
train. You give your checks to him, telling him what 
hotel you are going to, and he gives you a receipt. 
On arriving at Chicago you jump on a street car 
and go to your hotel. Within a couple of hours 
your baggage, which you have not seen since you 
left it at the hotel in New York, is delivered. (Some- 
times it isn't delivered for several days, but that is 
due to bad luck, and not to the system.) Of course 
you can take it to the station yourself and bring it 
away 3^ourself ; but it is always checked, and there 



RAILWAYS AND RAILWAY TRAVELLING. 127 

is no premium on baggage-stealing such as there is 
under the British haphazard method. 

As to speed. The American talks much about the 
enormous rate at which his trains travel. But strik- 
ing an average they are far slower than the British. 
America has several really magnificent trains that 
maintain a speed of between fifty to sixty miles an 
hour. You have, however, to pay an extravagant 
price to journey on them. 

I travelled thousands of miles by ordinary 
" express " trains, and the rate was about thirty-five 
miles an hour. Again, the trains were, as a rule, so 
unpunctual that I found myself removing some of 
the maledictions I had piled on several of our 
English railway systems. During the whole course 
of my tour only twice, when the distances were over 
a hundred miles, did the trains arrive in time. 
Twenty minutes, three-quarters of an hour, even an 
hour late was not unusual. 

Though in the case of specially expensive trains 
the American railway companies beat ours in regard 
to speed, we beat them in ordinary general passenger 
traffic, and we would beat them hopelessly if there 
was less dilatoriness at English railway stations, and 
so much time were not lost examining, punching, and 
collecting tickets. In a phrase, travelling in England 
is cheaper and quicker than in America. 

When I come to compare the comfort and conveni- 
ence of travelling it must be admitted the American 
has by far the best of it. Our lauded corridor 
coaches are rabbit hutches alongside the American 
cars. Our seats are too narrow for comfort, and 



128 AMERICA AT WOEK. 

travelling third-class — I exclude the splendid third- 
class dining cars from London to the north, which 
no American line gives you at the price — you are 
huddled in a way you never are in America. 

Some things exasperate the Briton when travel- 
ling trans-Atlantic fashion. In winter time the cars 
are uncomfortably over-heated, so that, in despera- 
tion, you would prefer the cold toes which mark an 
English journey, or the make-shift, unsatisfactory 
expedient of warming-pans. But, it must be remem- 
bered, the cars are warmed for Americans, and not 
for stray Britons. 

And here is a point to be considered when com- 
paring the two countries. The American is not so 
hardy as his British relative. He has more splash, 
but less stamina. Where an Englishman takes a 
" cold tub " in the morning the American takes a 
hot bath. An atmosphere which the Englishman 
thinks pleasant sends the American into a shiver. 
An American gets furious if he cannot have his room 
warm to stuffiness with hot-air pipes. 

Therefore, one reason why the Englishman puts 
up, without over-much protest, with cold railway 
carriages in the winter months, is because he is not 
the chilly mortal his friend across the Atlantic 
generally is. 

The hawkers on many American trains are a trial 
to patience. A lanky youth, often chewing, nasally 
yells the sale of newspapers, and should unfortun- 
ately his eye catch yours he pushes a halfpenny 
** yellow journal " in front of you and expects two- 
pence-halfpenny for it. You beat him off. Five 




OBSERVATION CAR ON THE 
PENNSYLVANIA LINE 



RAILWAYS AND RAILWAY TRAVELLING. 129 

minutes later he comes again selling candies. You 
tell him that you do not want sweetmeats. He 
knows better, and with dirty paws he will extract a 
couple of caramels and lay them on the seat. He 
tells you to taste, and he will come back and see 
what you think. Or he will put monkey-nuts (pea- 
nuts) by you without saying anything. He has eyes 
behind his head, for if you touch one nut he races 
back and is selling you five pennyworth before you 
can beat him off again. Within ten minutes he wants 
to sell you fruit. Next he comes along with a pile of 
paper-backed novels. If you happen to be reading 
you are safe. But if you are not reading he dumps 
a couple of novels by your side. In this way he dis- 
tributes the lot throughout the cars. Then he comes 
back and jumps at anyone whose curiosity has led 
them to lift one of the novels. Out of shame a man 
cannot then say he will not buy. 

Then the dining-car. It is switched on to trains 
and switched off trains, and you must eat when you 
can, and not when you want. I like sometimes to 
eat late; but frequently I had to feed at six 
o'clock because the car was taken off at seven. Tha 
" coloured gentlemen " who wait will wipe their 
perspiring foreheads with the cloth on which they 
wipe the plates. They insist on sugaring your tea 
and coffee, and eye you curiously if you prefer to do 
that yourself. 

Probably the rudest railway officials in the world 
are the French. But the Americans make a good 
second. The American car attendant speaks with 
insolence, and plays the bully in a way that 



130 AMEKICA AT WORK. 

would lead to his dismissal in England. He is 
just as good as you are, and he shows it by being 
rude. 

If you are a millionaire you may afford a *' state- 
room " to sleep in. But ordinarily you sleep in a 
made-up bed on the seats. The seat makes a lower 
berth, and part of the roof is let down for an upper 
berth. Heavy curtains are hung, so there is but a 
thin slice of a way down the centre of the car. Now 
and then your sleeping shelf is provided with an 
electric bulb light. Usually it is not. You disrobe 
as best you can in darkness behind the curtain, with 
an occasional backward bump into the gentleman 
undressing on the other side of the aisle. It is 
necessary to go through an acrobatic performance 
— the details of which cannot be revealed in print — 
to get your clothes off. If you are the occupant of 
an upper berth you do your undressing as best you 
can, lying down. 

Ladies and gentlemen occupy the same sleeping 
cars. The men have often to perform their ablu- 
tions in the smoking room. Half clad you wriggle 
past the curtains, convulsive with folks on the inner 
side trying to dress ; and some of the poetry slips out 
of life when you encounter a lady, who last night 
looked so sweet and captivating, sleepy-eyed, her 
hair in papers, and her clothing in what I think is 
called en deshahilld condition, attempting to scurry 
in the opposite direction. 

An Englishman's first experience with an Ameri- 
can Pullman sleeper makes him furious, unless it 
makes him laugh. The American sees nothing ob- 



RAILWAYS AND RAILWAY TRAVELLING. 131 

jectionable or humorous about it. He — happy 
mortal! — is used to it. 

But when Mr. Cornelius T. Slocum launches 
on one of his favourite topics, the inconveniences of 
travelling in " them little islands of yourn," it is not 
difficult to retaliate. 

In Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Boston, in Kew 
York, I had opportunities for inquiring into the 
management of several of the great lines. 

I came to the conclusion that as to the handling 
of passenger traffic the American companies have, 
at present, nothing to teach the British lines. I 
say " at present," because, knowing something of 
the conservatism of English lines, I was able to 
appreciate the untrammelled go-ahead-ness of the 
American, and could see how our trans- Atlantic 
friends are coming along hand over fist. Unless 
there is a tremendous change at home, I expect 
that in ten years the Americans will manage 
their passenger service as much better than we do 
as they are now ahead of us in the handling of mer- 
chandise. 

Take the matter of the supreme command of the 
lines. English lines are composed of boards of 
directors, titled men, often good business men, the 
soul of honour. Many directors know a great deal 
about railway management. But they have learnt 
it after they have become directors. 

In America such a system of management would 
only raise a smile. The chief person on an American 
railroad is the president, and his position is rather 
more important than that of chairman of directors 



132 AMERICA AT WORK. 

in England. Beneath him is the first vice-president, 
the second vice-president, the third vice-president, 
and the fourth vice-president. 

Take the Pennsylvania line — the most important 
and best managed railroad in the world — and inquire 
into the history of the president and vice-presidents. 
You will find that they all started as cleaners, as 
firemen, as drivers, as clerks in the employ of the 
company. They have risen from post to post because 
they have shown their worth. The board of manage- 
ment is made up of men of striking character, who 
have gone through all grades until the highest posi- 
tion is reached. Ability is the only thing that counts. 
Some of the railway directors I met were blunt, 
brusque, and used language that would make 
English directors squirm. But they knew all about 
the management of their line. 

I was struck with the esprit de corps among 
American railwaymen. Though I had long talks 
with many employees, I never heard ill-natured 
things said about the employers merely because they 
were employers. Trade unions are strong among rail- 
way workers. Earely, however, is there friction 
because of the employment of non-union men. The 
railway companies don't care a rap whether a man 
belongs to a trade union or doesn't. What they care 
about is whether he is a good workman, sober and 
steady. 

The " moderate drinker " finds it hard to gain em- 
ployment on the Pennsylvania Eailway. That com- 
pany prefers teetotallers. Several companies will 
not employ men if they smoke cigarettes. Practically 



RAILWAYS AND RAILWAY TRAVELLING. 133 

every company in America refuses to engage a new 
man if he is over thirty-five years of age. 

The British working man may think these con- 
ditions fearfully hard. So they are. If a man falls 
out of employment, say at the age of thirty-eight, 
his chances of getting similar work are practically 
gone. And yet every young fellow with spunk and 
energy in him knows that though he may be a 
cleaner to-day, he may, twenty-five years hence, be 
president of the line. It is like the feeling among 
Napoleon's warriors, when every soldier thought he 
was carrying a marshal's baton in his knapsack. 
If a lad does not get on in America, he knows there 
is only one person to blame. 

The railway services of America present a splen- 
did field for advancement. The well-educated man 
has, naturally, a better chance than the scantily 
educated; therefore — what I have never known in 
England — college graduates frequently join a rail- 
way company as firemen. They do not intend to 
remain firemen. They are ready to play their wits 
and strength against all other men, and the moment 
they prove their worth their advancement begins, 
and the promotion is often with startling rapidity. 
The majority of the companies will not promote a 
man to engine-driver over the age of twenty-seven. 
If by that age he has not proved his ability to drive 
an engine, he must stop as fireman, or something 
even lower. 

In regard to wages, I found that though there is 
a slight tendency to decrease in clerical offices, the 
tendency is upwards in regard to direct workers. 



134 AMERICA AT WORK. 

An engine-driver gets about 15s. a day, and a fire- 
man about 9s. Conductors get 13s. 6d. a day, and 
their assistants get about 7s.; telegraph operators 
7s. 6d. As to hours, there are times when engine- 
men, owing to stress of circumstances, are kept on 
duty from twenty to thirty-six hours at a stretch. 
The normal day on various lines is ten hours, but 
for telegraphists and yardmen it is twelve hours. 

It is difficult to strike averages. State laws 
regulate the hours of labour. In Ohio the maximum 
is fifteen hours' work and nine hours' rest ; in Minne- 
sota, Nebraska, and Colorado, it is eighteen hours' 
work. 

Just now the American railway employees are 
interested in Sunday work and overtime. In the 
eastern States from 20 to 30 per cent, of the men 
work on Sunday ; in the western States the percent- 
age rises to 80. Some companies do not pay at all 
for overtime; others, the majority, pay a proportion- 
ate extra rate, whilst the Illinois Central stands out 
as a notable exception by paying for Sunday labour 
and all labour over ten hours a day at the rate of 
one-and-a-half time. 

In England it is not infrequently the practice to 
bring in a man from another line to take a respon- 
sible position. That is hardly ever done in America. 
Promotion is the rule. To bring in outsiders would 
check enthusiasm and ambition. And American 
railway directors appreciate the sterling value of 
every employee knowing he will have a good job if 
he is deserving. 

It is the pride of the Pennsylvania line that all 



RAILWAYS AND RAILWAY TRAVELLING. 135 

its high officers once worked in the lowest ranks. A 
fact like this makes every office boy feel that perhaps 
he will be president some day. 

The system of discipline on the main lines is 
worth describing. Except for the very gravest 
offences, such as drunkenness whilst in charge of an 
engine, there is no instant dismissal. Everybody 
makes mistakes, and to discharge a man because he 
has made a slip is not good policy. For many years 
the rule was, in case of dereliction of duty, to sus- 
pend work and pay for a period of from ten to sixty 
days. That plan is now generally abandoned be- 
cause it bred discontent. The favoured system is 
a reprimand and a record of deficiency. A special 
book is kept, and a page is devoted to the personal 
record of every employee. It is not for general in- 
spection, but any man has a right to get a copy of his 
own record. If a man is guilty of an irregularity it 
is written down in the record book. The man con- 
tinues to work, and nobody suffers but himself, and 
he only in reputation at headquarters. If he makes 
two or three slips he gets a quiet *' talking to " from 
his superiors. He is told that if that sort of thing 
continues he will be dismissed. He therefore knows 
that when he is discharged it will not be entirely for 
the last offence. It will be because he is incompetent. 

Another plan is to issue bulletins recording ir- 
regularities on the road, and post them where all 
employees can read. No names are mentioned, but 
the accident or irregularity is described, and there 
is a comment from the manager's point of view, 
together with a remark how injurious such occur- 



136 AMERICA AT WORK. 

rences are to the company, and a little statement 
how the accident might have been avoided. The 
men frequently know to whom it refers, and there is 
a free discussion, which has a beneficial effect. 

On some roads a record of merits, as well as 
of demerits, is kept, and a period of clean record 
wipes out a period of bad record. So every man has 
a fair chance. 

The man, however, who suffers most is the man 
who is " unlucky." Sa3^s Mr. A. D. Stickney, pre- 
sident of the Chicago and Great Western Eailway : 
** The real incompetent is the man born tired and 
'unlucky,' who rarely does anything in time or in a 
proper manner, who is usually sick on stormy days, 
and physically unable to take a hard run, who 
through no fault of his own, which can be proven, 
usually breaks his train in two, pulls out and breaks 
drawbars, corners cars, and gets off the track when 
switching, who never does anything for which he is 
to blame, but is just ' unlucky! ' " 

That is the kind of man American railway com- 
panies will not have. The chances for a good man 
on an American line are splendid. There is no 
chance even of earning bread for the man who falls 
below excellence. 

Despite his little amiable weakness in the direc- 
tion of " blowing," the American is the most discon- 
tented creature on the face of the earth. He always 
wants to go one better than anybody else. And this 
discontent, of a healthy kind, is absolutely rampant 
in the management departments of big railways. 
There is a positive panting for improvement, and 



RAILWAYS AND RAILWAY TRAVELLING. 137 

the keenest of intelligences are brought to bear to 
effect economies. 

To save the cost of labour is an ever-pressing 
problem. But it is grappled with and partly solved. 
The expenditure of half a million is not reckoned if 
the ultimate saving of a million can be sighted. 
English railways, for instance, employ five times 
as many men per mile as do American lines. Within 
my remembrance the rates for carrying goods on 
American and English lines were the same. Now 
the average cost per ton per mile in America is a third 
of a penny. In England it is a fraction over a penny. 

The American railway manager always has both 
eyes wide open for improvements. And a thing 
which struck me as curious was that patents invented 
in England, but not used in England, are freely 
adopted in America. The American engines are 
huge and ugly, but they command respect. They 
are built big and heavy to get increased haulage 
power. They are, however, not to be compared with 
English-built locomotives for workmanship and 
finish. 

" Yes," said an American sarcastically, " English 
engines are fit to hang on a lady's watch-chain if 
only they were a little smaller." 



CHAPTER XII. 

CHICAGO. 

CHICAGO, to the people who live in Chicago, is 
*' the Queen City by the Lake," the hub of hust- 
ling, the place where, in the twentieth century, 
you see a go-ahead-ness which folks *' back-east," in 
New York, will only achieve two hundred and fifty 
years hence. 

To the people of the United States Chicago is an 
overgrown, ugly, dirty village, where pork is packed, 
and where there is a paucity of manners and a plenti- 
tude of money. 

Chicago, however, regards itself as the boss city 
of America. It has a contempt for New York, 
" which ain't no American city, but a job lot of a 
place near England." 

Say the Chicago folk, " Now, if you want to see 
a real American town, where things hum and are 
slap-bang up-to-date, where the people have no flies 
on them, you just study the way they do things in 
Chicago." 

Say the folk of other parts of America, " For 
goodness' sake don't take Chicago as a typical 
American city. Take Denver, or Cincinnati, or 
even wicked St. Louis, but don't take that vulgar 
Chicago." 

Thus paradoxical advice hems the unprejudiced 



CHICAGO. 139 

Briton anxious to learn and ready to generalise on 
the American people — and he finds the task impos- 
sible. 

When I was shown a tall building — I forget the 
number of storeys, but it was somewhere in the 
region of the seventies, or perhaps only twenty-seven 
— and was assured it was fireproof throughout, I 
involuntarily muttered "What a pity!" I gave 
offence to the Chicagoan who was with me. 

When in the presence of some journalists I 
spluttered that Chicago had an atmosphere as brac- 
ing as champagne, the newspapers came out next day 
with huge headings : " Chicago's Champagne Atmo- 
sphere! " 

" Jolly " the Chicago people — say nice things — 
and you are a sufficiently intelligent Britisher to be 
mistaken for an American. '* Josh " them — be sar- 
castic at their expense — and then you're a fossilised 
Englishman from a country that don't count, and is 
a back number anyhow! 

To see Chicago at work is to see the eighth wonder 
of the world. There is hardly a building to-day that 
was standing twenty-five years ago. Buildings reach 
away to the sky, and carry many men by elevators 
as near heaven as they have any reason to expect. 
If you get into Halstead Street, and march from one 
end to the other, you will have covered twenty-eight 
miles. 

There is a time of the very early morning when 
you can walk through Cheapside in London and 
meet nothing but policemen and a postal van. There 
is never a time of the night when State Street 



140 AMERICA AT WORK. 

in Chicago is quiet. The trolley cars run for ever. 
The saloons or public houses never close. 

The pace is furious. In the morning the streets 
are crammed with flabby-faced men — Teutons most 
of them — a great proportion corpulent to unhealthi- 
ness, and they hurry as though there remains but 
two minutes more before the banks are closed. You 
bump into a man. It is no good apologising, for he 
is nearly half a block away. A man bumps into 
you. He never apologises; time is too precious to 
waste over foolishness like that. The cars are packed. 
In the early business hours, when there are long 
processions of them clang-clang-clanging their way 
along the streets, men hang on to the sides and cling 
to the back of the cars. The elevated railroad, which 
darkens three parts of the street, is black and dingy, 
and the trains make a roar like thunder. In the sky- 
scrapers are " express " elevators and " local " eleva- 
tors. They are always packed, tossing men to the top 
storey, dropping like stones to the ground floor. The 
scamper along the mosaic-tiled passages suggests an 
outbreak of fire. I went into one building, all offices, 
where five thousand people were employed. In talk- 
ing to a business man it is necessary to get close 
and shout, for the air shivers with the clatter of 
typewriters. 

I never saw a street-sweeper in Chicago. When a 
brisk wind blows you cannoi see across the roadway 
for gritty dust, which is hurled at you like a tornado. 
So you turn your back and close your eyes to receive 
it. The roads are bad; rough cobbles, skull-sized, 
in the main streets, and just mother earth in the 



CHICAGO. 141 

suburbs. When it rains the streets are masses of 
greasy filth. As the police know nothing about the 
control of traffic, the conviction comes that you have 
a specially preserved life in that you are not run 
over every five minutes. In the poorer parts of the 
town there is no sewage scheme; if there is it is 
ineffective, for I have seen streets half full of slime 
and stinking matter. Chicago, magnificent city in 
many ways, is too busy money-making to attend to 
civic improvements. 

And here is where Chicago stands apart from 
other cities. The people of other cities hunt the 
dollar as hard as they know how. But they do not 
like to be regarded merely as money-makers; they 
like to think at any rate they have a passive admira- 
tion if not a keen affection for worthier things. 

Chicago has a University. It has a fine public 
school system. It has established vacation schools, 
which are likely to revolutionise the public educa- 
tion. It has fine libraries. But these are all " on 
the side." Chicago people are really on the earth to 
make money. They make no secret of that. They 
are frankly pagan. 

It is the most interesting of all dramas to watch 
Chicago at this money-making. Here is a town 
where it is no disgrace to be a swindler, no disgrace 
to have been in prison, provided you still have plenty 
of money. To start a bogus company and defraud 
the public is smart. The same sort of thing goes on 
in other cities — in London, for instance — but neither 
in London nor, indeed, anywhere except in Chicago 
have I seen among the great mass of the population 



142. AMERICA AT WORK. 

such a slackness of commercial morality, a passive 
acknowledgment it is well to get rich honestly, but 
that it doesn't so much matter so long as you get 
rich somehow. 

Chicago has practically none of the leaven of 
the old American spirit such as is met with in the 
eastern States. Seventy-five per cent, of the popula- 
tion is foreign born, largely German, much Jew, 
some Italian, some Swedish, some Irish, and but the 
tiniest sprinkling of Anglo-Saxon. Most of the 
citizens are, therefore, immigrants, folks of deter- 
mination and purpose, or they would not have left 
their home countries. But they come not from even 
the middle class of their home countries, but from a 
lower strata of society. From indigence they have, 
by their own tremendous ardent powers, jumped into 
wealth. And the tendency among the new rich, far 
more than in other countries, is towards ostentation. 
The only aristocracy is one of wealth. All the ten- 
dency is to social fireworks and display, and one- 
cent yellow press praise. The wife of the multi- 
millionaire cuts dead the wife of the mono-million- 
aire. Everything and everybody is judged by money 
value. 

The streak of the dollar obtrudes into religion. 
The churches are as gaudy as music-halls. Plain 
preaching is not sufficient. The attraction of the ser- 
vice, such as a whistling solo in the place of an 
anthem, is advertised in the papers. Chicago clergy- 
men do not speak of the good work their brothers 
are doing. They say So-and-so has a $4,000 church, 
or that young So-and-so is giving up a $1,600 church 



CHICAGO. 143 

for a $3,000 church. It is the stipend that is spoken 
about. 

Comparatively few of the churches are open on 
Sunday night. All the theatres, and music-halls, 
and saloons, and low resorts certainly are. To 
wander along State Street on a Sunday evening is 
to witness sights the equal of which is to be seen in 
no other city in the world — and as to what may be 
seen in other cities of the world I have some little 
experience. I sauntered in State Street into an 
" anatomical museum," really a quack-doctor's 
establishment, and I saw waxen representations of 
things which made me feel sick. 

There is no suggestion of Sunday evening. The 
shop doors are closed, but all the windows are a 
blaze of light, and before them are crowds of women 
looking at the bonnets on slowly revolving discs, or 
watching the electric appliances that dazzle the eye 
with sudden gleams of tinted globes. 

Crowds surge about the lower class theatres. 
There is the beating of a drum and the shriek of a 
hurdy-gurdy to attract to a dime museum. At one 
street corner is a man yelling anarchy. He has a 
big crowd. 

At another street corner is a sallow, curly-haired 
individual demonstrating that the earth is flat. He 
has two hundred listeners. 

At another corner is a semicircle of Salvationists, 
and a tall woman in a poke bonnet is crying in 
prayer " God will strike Chicago to hell." There are 
not more than half a dozen onlookers. 

Chicago has its poor, and plenty of them. Mr. 



U4 AMERICA AT WORK. 

Davies, a keen, warm-hearted, enthusiastic fellow, 
the chief factory inspector for Illinois State, gave a 
day as guide, showing me round " Little Italy " and 
" the Ghetto." 

" You Americans," I remarked, " are always 
making comparisons about the distress of Europe 
and the fine wages made in the United States." 

He smiled. " I can take you to places," he said, 
"where life is just a struggle; where, if you gave 
a one-cent banana to a family of five it would be the 
greatest treat they have had for weeks." 

We went slumming. And having said some 
things that are severe about Chicago I must in all 
fairness say the surroundings were by no means 
so foul and evil-odoured as in the purlieus of Shore- 
ditch, where most of the London tailoring is done. 
In the "sweat shops" the places were wretched; 
furniture was lacking; the finger of poverty was 
there. But, comparatively spealjing, the rooms were 
not unclean. 

All the cheap tailoring is done by the Jews or 
Italians. In one house I saw an old woman who re- 
ceived two cents (one penny) for doing all the sew- 
ing to a pair of trousers. By working early and 
working late, and always working hard, she cohld 
sew sixteen pairs in a day, and thus earn Is. 4d. 
The pay is better in the East End of London. 

A wretched sight was the children running the 
streets — little Italians, Jews, Hungarians, Swedes, 
Poles, Russians, a motley of half-starved, bare-footed, 
ragged-clad little ones — quite happy, however, pad- 
dling in the overflow of sewage. 




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CHICAGO. 145 

I had a long talk with Mr. Davies about the 
employment of children. This was his subject, the 
one dearest to him, the one he is wrestling with, and 
it is his ambition to crush the evil in Chicago if the 
law will let him. Good luck to him ! 

He told me there were lots of children under the 
age of twelve working in Chicago. When I refused 
to believe him he took me to his office, and brought 
out report after report of inspectors who had found 
children of twelve earning their poor four shillings 
a week (one dollar) among the horrors of Chicago 
slaughter-houses. The law of Illinois State is that 
employers shall not knowingly engage children 
under fourteen. To safeguard themselves the em- 
ployers make the parents sign a declaration that the 
lads are over fourteen. These parents are nearly 
all freshly arrived immigrants, the dregs of Europe. 
They lie, for they need the dollar. Some of the pork 
packing firms repudiate responsibility by flaunting 
the signed declaration in Mr. Davies' face. But Mr. 
Davies told me that of the cases of boys obviously 
under the age of fourteen that had been inquired into 
by the inspectors, quite 98 per cent, w^ere found to be 
under age. 

Chicago excels all other towns in the world in 
the hugeness of its department stores — mighty struc- 
tures, granite faced, mahogany lined, luxuriously 
fitted, where everything may be purchased. Thou- 
sands of girls serve behind the counters — smart girls 
who go through their work with a zest and vim that 
is remarl^able. It is kept up day after day, month 
after month. The heads of sections of departments, 



146 AMERICA AT WORK. 

good, level-headed business women, get well paid — 
sometimes as much as £3 a week. The ruck of the 
girls are paid badly, as low frequently as 10s. 6d. 
a week. And this in a city where living is twice as 
expensive as in London. 

Where I went quietly gleaning knowledge, I 
deeply regret I heard long strings of stories of money- 
greed, irreligion, repudiation of family ties, degrad- 
ing conduct by people bearing well-known Chicago 
names — the kind of things that the one-cent yellow 
press gloat over and illustrate with pictures. 

Yet among all this is the business frenzy, the 
wide-eyed hunger for money, more money, sought for 
by intellects that are as keen as razors, that see as 
though by intuition swift paths to fortune, by men 
who, when a great obstacle threatens ruin, sit down 
and think and think, and find a way, or make one, 
to climb the obstacle. 

Everything is done on a big, and to the English 
mind a reckless scale. Last year on the railway 
lines that run into Chicago 15,000 twenty-ton freight 
cars were thrown on the scrap-heap, not because they 
were used up, but to make way for freight cars of 
forty to fifty ton capacity. 

Many a time I have gone into an English rail- 
way goods shed and seen the piled-up masses of 
merchandise, often a mountain of confusion, with 
goods being sent off by freight train perhaps to-day, 
perhaps next week, as soon as possible certainly, but 
not on a system. Often have I stood in a goods yard 
watching shunting operations, the shunter with his 
pole releasing the couplings, the engine puffing back- 



CHICAGO. 147 

wards and forwards, giving a kick to this car, being 
attached to another, hauling that, leaving it un- 
coupled, shunted again, and so, after delay, getting 
a train made up in proper shape. 

A crowd of railway companies focus their lines 
on Chicago, though a great mass of the traffic is 
through freight to be transferred from one line to 
another, and taken west or brought east. Were all 
this to be brought into Chicago there would be con- 
gestion. But it isn't. Thirty odd miles away, mak- 
ing a loop about Chicago, is the little line known as 
the Elgin, Joliet, and Eastern. All the great lines 
must at various points cross this to reach the city. 
Freight, however, intended for beyond is not brought 
in. It is detached on reaching the belt, sent along 
to the line it next traverses, and so keeps outside the 
radius of congestion. 

The engines and the freight cars are enormous. 
The aim of American lines is to increase the haulage 
power, and this can only be done with mammoth 
engines. They have not nice green bodies, and the 
drivers don't find entertainment, as English drivers 
sometimes do, in making shaded designs with greasy 
cloths. If there is paint it is black or dark grey. 
Often there are sections not painted at all. The heavy 
castings are not polished ; they are rough. The brass 
work seems crude. But all this is where elegance is 
not needed. Where delicacy is wanted you sometimes 
find pieces of machinery nearly as exquisite as that 
turned out of an English locomotive works. The 
tendency is to have cars of from thirty- to fifty-ton 
capacity. To draw sixty of such cars requires an 



148 AMERICA AT WORK. 

engine of mighty power. Of course the initial cost 
is more, and the speed is not so groat ; but the great 
fact is that while rates in America have gone down 
train loads earn more. 

Most of the big lines have what is called a switch- 
yard, where goods trains are made up. The rails 
are arranged not unlike a herring bone, one line in 
the centre, and others curving off. All these curves 
are slightly graded so that a truck will keep run- 
ning to its place until the brake is applied. When 
two trucks meet they automatical!}^ couple; indeed, 
the use of automatic couplings is obligatory by law. 

In one of these gravity yards all the switches are 
worked by electricity. The engine gives a kick to a 
car and sends it rolling along the line ; it kicks again, 
and sends a second; it kicks once more, and along 
goes a third. A yard man semaphores with his arms 
where each truck is destined. A man sitting in a 
little box of a tower presses buttons. He closes by 
electricity switches Nos. 1, 2, and 3, and sends the 
first car along No. 4. He lets the second car possibly 
run to No. 9 ; perhaps the third car goes along No. 1. 
The whole thing is neat. 

I spent an interesting afternoon at the city freight 
depot of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul rail- 
road. It was just an ordinary casual scene, when 
the cars were being loaded for despatch at six o'clock 
that evening. Therefore it was more practically 
interesting than any special rush. 

Let me describe exactly. There was a very long 
shed, the floor raised some four feet six inches from 
the ground. On one side of the shed was the de- 




PERPETUAL LADDER DELIVERING 
GOODS IN CHICAGO. 



CHICAGO. 149 

livery yard, into which all the waggons with their 
freight came. On the other side of the shed stood 
eight goods trains in a row, and each of nine cars. 
They were drawn up with military precision ; all the 
centre doors were wide open; the cars were joined 
with steel platforms. So from the shed one could 
walk through to the eighth train. With all the doors 
open it was easy to get to any of the seventy-two 
cars that were standing there that day. 

Opposite each of the doors facing the trucks are 
doors opening upon the j^ard. To these waggons 
back up. A special gang of labourers unload and 
weigh. A clerk checks the bill, and a foreman sticks 
a label, say " No. 16," on a package, whether it be a 
piano or a basket of peaches. Another lot of men 
take the loads to the cars. A loader picks up the 
card No, 16. He doesn't look at the address on the 
package. It is nothing to him whether the load is 
going to Minneapolis or Denver, His duty is to place 
that parcel in car No. 16. He does. He deposits his 
ticket in a little tin box hanging by the door, and 
off he goes with his barrow, drops it in the shed, and 
picks up another barrow loaded, that may be for 
'* No. 32." Meanwhile a foreman is strolling through 
the cars taking out the cards, running his eye over 
them, and if he sees a '' No. 18 " in a " No. 16 " box 
he knows instantly something has got into the wrong 
car, and it mxist be found and put in the right one. 

The whole thing seemed to be simplicity itself. It 
was not so much a system, however, as an evolution — 
the outcome of long years of experience. As the time 
approached six o'clock the yard was full of drays 



150 AMERICA AT WORK. 

and carts, and waggons. But they all took their 
turn to discharge at one of the many doors. There 
was no piling up on the goods shed floor. They were 
piled on barrows and taken on to the weighing 
machine, pulled off, and let stand there for half a 
minute or a minute, till an empty-handed man seized 
the barrow and ran it through the seventh door to the 
fourth car, or whatever might be the number it was 
marked for. 

At six o'clock the loading was done, and at three 
minutes past the trains were being hauled out. 

Of course, a car does not carry goods simply to 
one place. It may have freight for a dozen or more 
places. But those places will be contiguous, all 
within the stretch of what is called a division. Time 
would be wasted if there was a halt at every way- 
side station where a sewing machine or a box of 
soap had to be delivered. So the train setting off 
for a 400-mile run drops one or two cars at the begin- 
ning of a division, runs on to the next division, 
drops more, and so on, getting over the 400 miles at 
a not much less speed than a passenger train. At 
the beginning of each division another engine picks 
up the load, and peddles its way from little station 
to little station, discharging cargo. 

After that I went to the " in house," where 
goods for Chicago are received. Here there was 
system. All freight for the city was on one side a 
fence ; all to be transferred to some near locality was 
on the other side. The whole shed was divided into 
Sections 1 , 2, 3, and the rest. A glance at the way 
bill shows what section goods asked for were in, and 



CHICAGO. 151 

whether they were city or out-of-city. Another plan 
is to move the newly-arrived freight near the doors, 
for experience has taught this is the more likely to 
be quickest collected. Goods are allowed to stand 
for thirty days. If not claimed they are put into an 
adjoining shed. If not claimed they are then carted 
to a shed outside the town, and if no owner turns up 
within a year they are sold by auction. 

Chicago, as you see, is a complex city. Only to 
praise it would be to shut eyes on its many hideous 
characteristics. Only to condemn it would be to 
ignore a town where business — unsentimental, but 
far-seeing — is conducted with as clear an eye and as 
steady a purpose as at any town in the world. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

HOG KILLING AND PACKING IN CHICAGO. 

YES, sir, we ' can ' everything, and find a use for 
everything — except the squeak! " 

The man who was showing me round the 
slaughtering and packing houses of Chicago gave 
a glance out of Vn.Q corner of his eye. But I refused 
to laugh at his joke. I had heard it before, over four 
years ago, when I paid a similar visit. So I re- 
marked, " How many times do you say that in the 
course of a day ? " 

" Sometimes not more than a dozen ; but I once 
said it thirty-two times, and I've been saying it for 
seven years, and it makes everybody laugh — except 
those who have been here before. Walk gently, sir; 
blood is such a greasy thing to tread on." 

Four years previously, when hot and sick I 
escaped from Armour's slaughter-houses, where I 
had watched scientific pig-sticking and bullock- 
felling, and looked upon an old fat decoy sheep 
leading other sheep into the killing pen, I vowed 
that never again would I look upon such a sight. 

Yet here I was, with my trousers turned up, 
sliding along planks mahogany-hued with what ran 
over them, and in my nostrils and mouth was the 
odour of hot blood. 

I had seen pigs killed at the rate of 600 an hour, 




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HOG KILLING IN CHICAGO. 153 

the throats of sheep cut at the rate of 620 an hour, 
and big, meek-eyed beasts utter their last moo of 
pain at the rate of 240 an hour. I had seen a cow, 
with wonder in its big eyes, hit over the head with 
a mallet, and thirty-nine minutes after seen the car- 
case, all dressed, on the way to the cooling-room. 
I had seen a pig gripped by the hind leg, sent cir- 
cling up a wheel on the way to death, and thirty-two 
and a half minutes later it was all ready for con- 
sumption, save cooling. I had seen a sheep utter a 
shrill bleat as its throat was given to the knife, and 
thirty-four and a half minutes later it was mutton. 

It was a sight that haunted me for the rest of 
the day. 

But it was dexterous; it was neat; it was as 
humanely done as such things can be humane; it 
was a splendid piece of machinery, for everything 
seemed to move by clockwork. 

It was a hot day when I went to the stock-yards. 
They lie in the ugly suburbs of Chicago, a network 
of white-washed pens, where were cattle and sheep 
and hogs brought in from the West by the heavy 
train load. On a big board were the sale numbers 
for the day — a quiet day, for it was the middle of 
the week— Cattle 17,000, hogs 26,000, sheep 25,000. 
The air was thick with the smell of byres. About 
the adjoining saloons lounged long-legged drovers 
in broad-brimmed hats, and chewing tobacco or 
smoking cigars. In the background reared the 
works of Messrs. Armour, of Messrs. Swift, of Messrs. 
Libby McNeill and Co., of Nelson, Morris and Co.. 
and other firms. 



154 AMERICA AT WORK. 

There were overhead galleries, and along them 
came the scurry of many feet. Animals were being 
driven to the slaughter-houses. The stench sickened. 
In crowded covered pens where the pigs were, men 
sprayed the animals to keep them cool. When the 
pigs were released from the pens they ran past two 
government inspectors watching for disease. A 
healthy pig ran with a swaying head. A sick pig 
ran straight. Like a dart any unhealthy pig was 
fixed upon, a tag stuck through his ear, and the 
brute turned on one side. It would afterwards be 
killed under the eye of the law. If then the pork was 
found healthy, it was passed. If not, it was turned 
into fertiliser, and what the sale produced was 
handed to the owner of the animal. 

The works I visited were those of Messrs. Swift. 
It would be easy enough to let my pen run into 
dramatic description of the brandishing knife, the 
spurting blood, the crimson and soaked garments 
of the men. Let all that, however, be imagined, and 
let me deal with the business side, and show how 
these great Chicago houses get through their work. 
The pigs, squealing with fright, are driven along 
a sort of gutter. Five or six at a time are let 
through a doorway into a pound, where there is a 
great wooden wheel always on the turn. A pig is 
seized, and in a trice a chain is round one of the 
hind legs, and the wheel, revolving, hauls the pig 
up in the air. Another and another is caught and 
fastened. There is a succession of wriggling, scream- 
ing swine being hoisted. As the wheel descends it 
slips each chain to a travelling pulley, which carries 




SCALDING THE PIGS. 




Photos : Thompson Photo Co., Chicago. 



THROAT-CUTTING. 



HOG KILLING IN CHICAGO. 156 

the pigs past the killers, big burly men, and each 
man selects his animal, and with a plunge of the 
knife cuts a throat. The pit streams blood; men 
with brooms brush it into a channel, and it flows off 
to barrels. Each killer cuts the throats of about 
twenty pigs a minute. 

Death soon comes. And now, until the cooling 
room is reached in thirty-two minutes, the carcase 
passes a procession of 150 men, each having some- 
thing to do. It is very little for each. The brute is 
past in a few seconds; but it is something definite, 
which each man, according to his duty, attends to, 
and nothing else. 

The carcase drops into a bath of scalding water. 
A cradle lifts it out, and another chain grips the legs, 
and the body is dragged through a tube filled with 
wire brushes. Heavy springs make a vigorous pres- 
sure, and nearly all the bristles are removed. 

The body drops on a moving platform. One man 
scrapes the bristles from under one leg, a second the 
bristles from under another leg. Again there is the 
clamp of a chain, as the carcase goes on its way 
suspended. A man rips the stomach, and twenty 
men in turn extract certain parts of the entrails. 
A man gives a sweep of the neck with his knife, the 
next man gives another slash, the third man catches 
the head as it falls and pitches it on one side, the 
next slices a paw, the next finishes the operation and 
cuts it off. So past 150 men. Then the carcase 
reaches the cooler, a great chill chamber, which 
made me shiver when I entered it. 

Not one pig, but dozens of pigs, are all going 



156 AMERICA AT WORK. 

through the same operation at the same time. In 
their six plants Swift's have killed 27,386 hogs in a 
single day. 

The cutting-up does not take place for two days. 
Men strike at the carcase with knives three parts as 
long as swords, and with a slash a ham is made, and 
the pieces over go flying into a tub close by. The 
finest hams are for the English market. An English- 
man knows good ham and bacon. The American 
does not have the chance. 

Waste! There is no waste. All those morsels 
cut off to trim the hams and bacon sides go for 
sausages. I went into the sausage room. In big 
saucers, with a rocking blade, were all the bits 
thrown and chopped fine. Men were moving about 
with wheelbarrow-loads of meat. It w^as pitched 
into machines. Men fixed rapidly the skins on the 
nozzles, and the sausage came out in apparently 
endless flow. Girls seized it, and with the adroitness 
of conjurers tied knots, which made the ordinary 
sized sausages. Frequently Swift's turn out 100,000 
lb. of sausages in a day. 

But the killing of cattle is equally quick. Two 
hundred and forty head are despatched in the hour. 
The beasts are driven along a narrow passage. 
Sliding doors divide off two into each compartment. 
Men walking on a platform by the side swing steol 
hammers and catch the brutes between the eyes. 
Instantly the side of the stall swings up, and the 
stunned creature rolls upon the floor. Four men fix 
a chain to a hind leg. 

"Haul away! " and up swings the animal, and 




FELLING CATTLE. 




STUNNED CATTLE. 



Photos: Thompson Photo Co., Chicago. 



HOG KILLING IN CHICAGO. 157 

its own weight carries it on a pulley down an in- 
clined plane to where the " bleeder " stands. He 
cuts the veins. A man w^th a bucket steps forward, 
and moves, as the animal is slung along, catching 
the blood. The body runs past five men before the 
head is chopped off. Down goes the beast on its 
back. Six men attack the fore legs, skin them, and 
cut them off at the knee. Eight men attack the 
hind legs and cut them off at the hocks. Two men 
with axes level blows in swift succession, and divide 
the front of the carcase in two from head to tail. A 
boy seizes the gullet; another boy dives for the 
sweetbread. 

Four men remove the caul fat. Fifteen men drop 
around the brute and get the skin loose. Three men 
saw the breast bone in as many places. 

Grappling chains raise the body. A chopper 
divides the pelvis bone. Seven men skin the hind 
quarters. It takes two men to skin the tail, two men 
to cut it off, and a boy to throw it into a box. I 
never saw^ such division of labour. Yet everything 
was going without a hitch. 

Again the animal is attacked. Six men finish 
the skinning on the flanks and six on the back; 
seven sawyers cut through the bone ; six men clear 
out the intestines (taken possession of by a govern- 
ment inspector and tested for signs of disease), eight 
men split the back-bone ; four trimmers mount step- 
ladders and trim off bruises from the flanks; four 
trim the inside ; four spread the hide on the floor, 
and there is inspection for cuts, and the man loses 
his job if he is guilty of more than two cuts a day. 



158 AMERICA AT WORK. 

Four wheel away the hide ; two, with their hands and 
a funnel, pump blood from the shoulders; six men 
run over the half carcase to trim again ; eight with 
scrubbing brushes and hot water wash the two 
halves ; five wash the inside, and the cloths used are 
replaced every five minutes ; others wash the neck and 
shoulders; others saw the back-bone; others scrape 
the inside ; four men wipe with a dry cloth ; then off 
the half carcases are pushed to the chilling room, 
which will hold 13,340 sides. 

The temperature was 38 degrees when I was there. 
The floor was all sawdust, and passage after passage 
of meat I walked through. The best meat is ex- 
ported to England for the reason I have already men- 
tioned. The horns go for combs and handles, the 
hoofs for buttons, the hides for leather, the blood goes 
to a factory, where it becomes paint, or clarifies 
sugar; the intestines may be utilised for sausage 
casings or by putty makers or gold beaters. Nothing 
is ever thrown away. 

It was but a stroll across a road to Libby 
McNeill's place, from where three-quarters of the 
canned meat in the world is despatched. More 
wonders ! 

It would have been interesting to have watched 
a pig run in at the end of a tube and come out as 
two dozen pork pies at the other. But that is not 
yet, though it will be, no doubt, before many years. 
But here again everything was being done at a 
pace which had the swiftness of a trick. All that 
was ingenious, that required skill, was done by 
Qfiachine. All the hundreds of men and thousands 



HOG KILLING IN CHICAGO. 159 

of girls had to do was to play attendant to the 
machines. 

Have you seen a cutter slice swedes in a farm- 
yard ? At Libby's you can see hunks of dried beef 
subjected to a similar process by an electric-driven 
machine, and shaving slices of meat as thin as 
wafers. The meat is put on a travelling band, and 
slowly goes past a regiment of girls, who have stacks 
of glass jars by them. They seize one or two nice 
leaves of meat, and with deft fingers pack it neatly 
against the inside of the glass. That is for appear- 
ance sake, to make the jar look nice. Once that 
layer is arranged, a handful of meat is seized and 
jammed in with fingers and thumbs till the pot 
is filled. It travels on. Other girls affix a cover; 
others put on labels; others wipe the jars; others 
wrap them up. 

We have all had beef tea — the old-fashioned 
honest beef tea that has simmered on the kitchen 
fire by the hour. At Libby's is to be seen the 
modern Chicago method: three tons of meat and 
blood at a time. In a huge boiler, and through little 
trap doors of glass, the dull fluid is shown on the 
bubble. The extract is run into little pots, takes 
on consistency as it cools, and is then " an ox in a 
tea cup," or something equally interesting. 

We have all had a stir at a Christmas pudding. 
That is an event of the year. I saw the stirring 
done at Libby's with iron arms, automatically, and 
girls with all sentiment squeezed out of them — for 
they were paid according to the amount of work 
they did — patting out cakes of the sad-looking mix- 



160 AMERICA AT WORK. 

ture, wrapping them up in delicious coloured paper, 
and tossing the parcels into boxes. 

In the kitchen a string of tins crawled past a 
crowd of girls. They put a savoury-odoured fluid 
called soup into each, threw in a handful of collops, 
and let the tin pass on. Somebody placed lids loosely 
on each. The slap of a machine fastened the lid on. 
The can ran along, fell on its side, and the edge 
rolled through a little bath of solder. It passed 
into a glass chamber. A hole was punched; all the 
air in the tin was extracted ; a drop of lead fell on 
the aperture and made it air-tight. As though pos- 
sessed by a little demon each can ran up a fence, 
went gliding among a maze of machinery, and when 
it was seen again had been automatically painted. 
It rolled on again brightly blue, and the next sight of 
it was with a bright ribbon of a label round its 
waist. 

A curious, but striking and apparently paradox- 
ical fact, is that the prosperous pork and beef busi- 
nesses of Chicago do not pay. Take the figures for 
1901. The total expenses of the packing houses 
were £150,244,848, made up of such items as 136 
millions for material, 5 millions for rent, 80 millions 
for wages, and so on, and the actual amount pro- 
duced by sale of meat was just £124,263,998. Yet 
on the year there was a profit of £6,767,638. How 
was the big deficit turned into a big profit, and the 
£32,748,488 made up ? 

Simply by the utilisation of the by-products. As 
I have said, nothing is ever lost. There is not an 
ounce of a dead animal thrown away. As to the 



HOG KILLING IN CHICAGO. 161 

much-regretted uncaptured pig's squeak, I am sure 
Swift's would give a high royalty to anyone who 
could devise that it be used for political purposes, 
or be converted into a child's toy, or a motor-car 
horn. 

Of the 32 millions, 12 millions were drawn from 
lard, 3 millions from oils, nearly 7 millions from 
hides, more than a million from fertilisers and wool, 
and the other millions are contributed by a hundred 
other products. 

In the slaughtering of swine at Swift's was to 
be seen the working of the ingenious American mind. 
Save labour and get all you can done by machine ; 
push men and machines to their top speed; waste 
little, and what is considered waste turn into some- 
thing that will make dollars! 

Huge businesses, " on the side," as they say in 
the States, are growing up as the result of using 
by-products. Swift's have an enormous soap fac- 
tory. In one place I saw ten mighty tanks, each 
boiling 250,000 lb. of soap. When cold the soap was 
cut out in chunks the size of a lodging house ward- 
robe. It was pushed through machinery and cut 
into slabs. The slabs were sliced into bars. The 
bars were divided into 1 lb. blocks, the thump of a 
machine stamped the names on, and girls at the 
tables looked as though they each had four hands 
from the way, with a pull, a push, a twist, and a 
shove, they had the cakes wrapped and packed in 
boxes. 

There were fancy toilet soaps, nicely curved and 
trimmed by machinery, and there was the wool soap, 



162 AMERICA AT WORK. 

of which Swift's are very proud, which floats, and 
on a hundred affidavits they are prepared to swear 
prevents wool from shrinking. 

Then there was the dairy, where butterine or 
margarine is made from beef fats. This was another 
great business to itself. Men drove spades into the 
butterine — made actually of 40 per cent, oleo oil, 
some cotton-seed oil, and the rest milk — and sent it 
flying down a shoot, when men seized handfuls, 
threw it to a machine that turned out two-pound 
pats and dropped the pats before girls, who wrapped 
them neatly. All butterine sold in Illinois State 
must be labelled as such, and being in the main 
white, makers have to pay a 10 per cent, duty if they 
add colouring matter to make it look like real butter. 
Swift's I found very cock-a-hoop with themselves, 
for they had discovered a means by which, without 
using colouring matter, they could obtain a rich 
yellow tint, and so provide their customers with some- 
thing that looked like butter. And the look of a thing 
counts far more in America than it does in any other 
civilised country. 

These great packing houses have choked the 
ordinary butchering business. A butcher cannot 
utilise many by-products. A packer, however, can 
sell the meat of a steer for less than he paid for the 
animal and look to the by-products for his profit. 

And these packers, w^ho can stow hundreds of 
thousands of sides of beef in the huge ships fitted 
specially with refrigerators, have not only their eyes 
on the British meat markets, but their hands. 

The control of one of these concerns is not busi- 



HOG KILLING IN CHICAGO. 163 

ness ; it is generalship. An eye must be kept on the 
cattle-breeding of Mexico, and another eye on the 
London market. The tariff question must ever be 
kept in view; the value of skins not lost sight of; 
railways are to be bullied or conciliated ; economies 
are to be made,, and prices cut. 

The battle is fierce, relentless, and all the small 
traders are crushed out of existence. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

METHODS OF BUSINESS IN CHICAGO. 

FOR months the hoardings of Chicago bore the 
legend, "Watch those footsteps!" "Whose 
footsteps, what footsteps, and watch them 
where? " was the enigma 

*' Who's Griffiths ? " the conundrum that years 
ago puzzled the brains of Londoners, was not half 
so '* catchy " as " Watch those footsteps! " It was a 
phrase that slipped into the public mind, and dropped 
easily from the tongue. 

It was the satire of the street urchin upon podgy 
Teutonic gentlemen from Milwaukee who puffed 
along Dearborn Street, with toes pointing a quarter 
to three. It was the comment of the *' men about 
town " who, standing by the hotel doors, saw pretty 
damsels pass. It was the " gag " of the " high-class 
Vaudevilles." 

Everybody knew " Watch those footsteps! " was 
some dodge. But curiosity was piqued. Suddenly 
one morning, as Chicago was panting to business, 
it noticed that inset in the pavement of several streets 
were brass footprints. They led to the shop doors 
of a big firm of shoe dealers. Chicago chuckled, and 
the big firm got an advertisement. Then some wags 
took to decorating pavements with footsteps from 
offices of acquaintances to drinking saloons, from the 
saloon to another, from saloon to saloon, with an 



METHODS OF BUSINESS IN CHICAGO. 165 

increasingly tottering gait, and ultimately brought 
them to somebody else's doorsteps. 

Advertisement by dodge is more prolific in 
Chicago than in any other American town, and that 
means a good deal. There is a school for advertisers, 
where business folk who want their imagination 
stimulated are instructed how to make announce- 
ments attractive and induce the readers to visit 
shops. The chief thing is to wheedle women. The 
women, however, go, not really to buy — just to 
look! Getting them to do that is the first essential 
— the rest is easy. 

American shops, especially the huge dry goods 
stores, understand feminine nature " right down to 
the ground." There is no worrying the ladies to 
purchase. But the shopkeeper knows that if he has 
nothing that will send the customer into a rapture 
and readily part with her five-dollar bill under the 
impression she is securing a bargain, it is about time 
for him to give up business. 

The advertising department or " publicity depart- 
ment " of a great American business, be it a big 
railroad or a shoe factory, is far more important 
than in England. The chief is usually a journalist 
who gets anything up to £2,000 a year to arrange 
the style of advertisements. Money is freely given 
to anybody with a happy, novel idea. Firms vie 
with each other in paying for advertising novelties. 
The advertising manager of one firm told me he 
always set Monday and Tuesday apart to see folks 
with ideas. His visitors on those two days were often 
as many as a hundred and fifty. Earely, however, 



166 



AMERICA AT WORK. 



were more than 2 per cent, of the suggestions any 
good. 

" Standing advertisements " — the same, week in 
and week out — Americans will not look at. This 
remark does not apply, of course, to advertisements 
that consist of a catch word in regard to a biscuit, 
or a cigar, or a patent medicine. It does, however, 
apply to ordinary advertisements. These are altered 
every day. Too much is not put in: the practice 
of saying the same thing fifty or sixty times, which 
is not uncommon in English advertisements, is 
avoided. The custom is to boom something particular 
and distinct. 

The method of dry goods stores is easiest as 
example. One day the whole advertisement will 
relate to jackets. There will not be huge chunk let- 
ters saying So-and-so is selling off at an enormous 
reduction: that is a crude way. The American 
advertisement calls attention to the chill weather 
and the comfort of having a warm coat. It draws 
comparisons between the cost of a coat and a doctor's 
bill. It points out how refined are this season's 
designs, how stylish and how comfortable. It 
probably says something about how the coat is 
made, where the wool comes from, how a special 
representative has been to Europe to report on the 
latest pattern. Easily, gradually, it plays on the 
mind of the reader until towards the end there comes 
the blunt, almost bluff, honest statement that Messrs. 
So-and-so have made a special study of ladies' coats, 
that quality and not cheapness is their aim, yet by 
a tremendous sale they are able successfully to 



METHODS OF BUSINESS IN CHICAGO. 167 

compete in price with every other firm. All this is 
written with skill and knowledge of human nature. 
To-morrow Messrs. So-and-so may be making a 
special line of hose, or " shirt-waists," or parasols. 
But always the advertisement is interesting to read, 
quite apart from the wares offered. 

That is where the American advertiser is cleverer 
than his British cousin. The British trader prepares 
his advertisement for those who want his goods. The 
American trader prepares his so that a newspaper 
reader will find as much entertainment in the adver- 
tising columns as in those devoted to the re-cording of 
events. It is worded so as actually to create a de- 
mand for the article advertised. 

The American spends more than the Englishman 
in advertising. One firm told me that when they had 
special sales on they spent as much as £800 on 
advertising in the Sunday papers. 

If you want to witness the effect of an advertise- 
ment in a Sunday paper visit the great store of 
Marshall Field in Chicago on a Monday morning, 
and see women, crowded, squeezed, perspiring, 
hustled, ravenously eager to get to the " bargain 
counters." There are crushes at drapery sales in 
London. But, by comparison, they are processions 
of church-goers alongside the Eugby scrimmage I 
have watched in a Chicago dry goods store on a 
Monday- 
There is a firm in Chicago, Montgomery Ward 
& Co., that has a unique business, trading with all 
parts of America, and not a few parts of the world 
by catalogue and post. They have no shop. Thej 



168 AMERICA AT WORK. 

have a catalogue. You pay 7Jd. for that catalogue, 
which is as big as the " London Directory." Mont- 
gomery Ward & Co. spend Is. Id. in postage sending 
it to you. 

There the American business genius peeps 
through. 

" We're not going to give you a book which, with 
postage, costs us 4s.," they say practically, *' but if 
you mean business and contribute 7Jd. we will con- 
tribute the rest." From the catalogue you select 
anything you want, as from an Army and Navy 
Store list. You send the money, and Montgomery 
Ward send you the goods. 

The curious part is that you cannot walk into 
the block owned by Montgomery Ward and buy a 
coal scuttle. They may have a dozen coal scuttles 
on the place; but they are not for sale. They are 
samples to show dealers from the country. 

Such a firm would probably not succeed in Great 
Britain. The distances are too small. Distances in 
America, however, are enormous, and there are 
millions of people who live on isolated ranches, or 
in villages hundreds of miles from any town, where 
plush rocking chairs, and sewing machines, and 
gramophones, and canned meats, and a thousand 
other things cannot be obtained. These are the kind 
of people for whom Montgomery Ward cater. 

Countryfolk get hold of a catalogue with its 
thousands of photographs of shoes, and saddles, and 
dinner sets, and ready-made clothing, and carpets, 
and books, and pianos, and select what they want. 
That explains why the firm often get as many as 



METHODS OF BUSINESS IN CHICAGO. 169 

30,000 letters a day. I was taken into the office 
where these letters were received. The clerks were 
girls. Their work was simple. It was to see that 
the orders were intelligible, to make out the several 
items for departments, and mark the instruction slips 
so that all the goods met and were forwarded in one 
consignment, and to see that the money was correct 
and sent to the cashier's office. 

The question I naturally put to the manager was 
whether there was not grumbling sometimes at an 
article not being what was expected, and folks want- 
ing their money back. This, of course, was so. But 
I was told that the firm made it a rule, if there was 
the least complaint, to ask for the goods to be sent 
back, the firm paying carriage both ways, and then 
the money returned in full without any deduction. 

" This business," said the manager, '' prospers on 
confidence. We cannot afford to lose a customer. If 
we lose him because he is discontented he is certain 
to make it his business to cause discontent in others. 
We are often imposed upon. Now and then we re- 
pudiate liability. But when something is wrong 
because the customer is ignorant, or careless, or dis- 
appointed, it isn't worth our while, for a dollar or 
two, to get his bad opinion. We try to be straight- 
forward in our catalogue, and every customer knows 
that if there is an accident he won't suffer by it." 

It was typical of Chicago— up to the elbows in 
business— the sight in the departments of this 
store, with about two thousand five hundred em- 
ployees; hundred of typewriters clicking every- 
where ; twenty-two elevators shooting up, dropping 



170 AMERICA AT WORK. 

down; five endless conveyers carrying goods to the 
packing rooms ; and sixty-five telephone instruments 
ringing all over the building. I was told the firm 
has two million customers. I was taken into a room 
stacked with index cabinets, so that it was easy to 
find out what dealings the firm had had with 
Farmer Hayseed, who was not quite pleased with 
the mower sent him. 

The correspondence of such a business is colossal. 
Confusion, however, is avoided by system. Every- 
thing goes through particular hands. If there is 
any doubt, there are always men to provide decision. 
Should anything go wrong, responsibility can be 
directly traced. 

Time is too short in Chicago for letters to be 
sealed in the old-fashioned way with a lick of a 
damp sponge. They are shot through an ingenious 
machine at a hundred a minute and come out sealed. 

Time is also too short in Chicago for a ton of 
letters to be sent to the Post Of&ce an hour or two 
before the closing of the mail so that the stamps may 
be cancelled. What Chicago firms do is to buy from 
the Government a few thousand pounds' worth of 
cancelled stamps. One firm recently bought £5,000 
worth of pre-cancelled stamps. In July of 1902 
the Chicago Post Office cancelled and sold 2,339,800 
such stamps — and July is an " off " month. Behind 
the Chicago Central Post Office is a little building 
with a printing press that runs ten hours a day can- 
celling stamps. A sheet of a hundred is cancelled at 
a time. 

This system of saving an hour or two a day by 



METHODS OF BUSINESS IN CHICAGO. 171 

selling cancelled stamps in Chicago has been in 
existence less than a couple of years. Yet at pre- 
sent over sixty big firms have received the permission 
of the United States Postmaster-General to pur- 
chase and use them. Last year £100,000 worth of 
cancelled stamps were sold in Chicago. In the busy 
season Montgomery Ward & Co. buy from £700 to 
£1,000 worth of stamps a day.* 

" What do you do with all the stamps sent you in 
payment of orders ? " I asked. 

*' Well, a good many are used for postage pur- 
poses. But the majority we sell to stamp jobbers, or 
anybody who comes to buy, at a discount of from 
2 to 5 per cent., according to the number we have on 
hand." 

Time is also saved in not sending the letters or 
goods that go by post from these great stores through 
the Central Post Office. The mail bags are made up 
in the stores themselves. A post official is present, 
and all goods addressed and stamped (cancelled) 
pass under his eye. If he has a doubt about sufficient 
postage, he has the package weighed. Then the firm 
make up their bags to particular States, and deliver 
them sealed right to the mail train. 

All this is a saving of time. And yet, strange 
though it may seem, the United States Post Office is 
as slow as that of Eussia. 

Again and again it struck me what a land of 

• In Great Britain we have marking by the Post Office of 
a hundred thousand letters at a time without the use of 
stamps at all. But we have no such plan as America has 
for packages. 



172 AMERICA AT WORK. 

contrast America is. With much that impresses the 
foreigner because of alertness and ingenuity, there is 
also much that surprises him because of inefficiency. 
I have had experience of postal systems in full two 
dozen countries, and those of America and Eussia I 
place on a par. 

To the Briton, with a postal system that is won- 
derful in excellence, with letters hardly ever missed, 
it is irritating to go to the United States, where even 
in New York and Chicago the collections are not half 
so frequent as in Leeds, or Birmingham, or Glas- 
gow, or any other big provincial town. Besides, you 
can never count on a particular delivery, and letters 
are constantly lost. There are no little post offices 
attached to other businesses, which we find so con- 
venient. If you want a stamp you must go to the 
central office, or to a stationer, who " obliges " you. 
The post boxes are insignificant and cheap, usually 
fastened crookedly to a drunken pole. There is no 
parcel post. 

The British Post Office department invited the 
United States department to join in our excellent and 
cheap parcel post system. But America wouldn't. 
The British Post Office, however, was not going to 
be restrained by American antiquarian methods. 
An Englishman can send a parcel to America at a 
small cost, and the British Post Office pays an 
American express company to deliver it. The Ameri- 
can has no such advantage if he wants to send a 
parcel to England. 

But the thing beneath contempt is the telegraphic 
system of the United States. The lines do not belong 



METHODS OF BUSINESS IN CHICAGO. 173 

to the Government, but are private corporations. 
I have had better experience with Chinamen in far 
western Yunnan province than I have had with 
Americans in New York State. 

Slovenliness is a mild word to apply to the 
average telegraph operator in America. Slowness 
does not express how very slow the United States 
telegraph companies really are. The charges are 
absurdly high. We British folk have often reason to 
grumble at our Post Office and telegraphic system, 
but we are fifty years ahead of the United States. 
On the other hand, in regard to the adaptability of 
telephones, the United States is a generation ahead of 
us. The Chicago man sits in his office and does busi- 
ness over the 'phone lying on his desk. He gets 
switched on the long-distance telephone, and he talks 
to a firm at Cleveland. His wife rings up the 
butcher and the baker each morning and orders the 
daily supplies. So much is done over the 'phone 
that the writing of a business letter is almost a lost 
art. 

The Chicago man — and, indeed, the remark 
applies generally to Americans — is in so mighty a 
hurry that when dictating he is thinking of some- 
thing else. So he is diffuse, roundabout with his ex- 
planations, and frequently incoherent. I know men 
whose dictated letters are clear, concise, and wholly 
relevant ; but they are the exceptions. 

Business, however, is good; money is everywhere; 
there is nothing in the day-time for the lounger to 
do; everybody seems young and enthusiastic and 
determined. There is the exhilaration of rush. 



174 AMERICA AT WORK. 

When a man is forty and has not made his pile it 
is time he moved out of Chicago. A man is middle- 
aged at thirty. At thirty-eight he may ooze dollars 
or be slouching beneath the pines at Los Angelos, 
with a nervous system all wreckage. 

There are hundreds of things disgusting about 
Chicago. The " brag " is enough to make an 
ordinary man ill, did he not possess a touch of 
humour and take himself into a corner now and then 
to laugh. The ostentation which slaps you in the 
face, makes the blood hot, and then sends a shiver 
down your back, suggestive of somebody walking 
over your grave. 

Manners, however, are things the true Chicagoan 
openly admits he has a contempt for. Courtesy and 
refinement are things that do not count. What does 
count with him is energy, long-headed business fore- 
sight, getting the better in every business deal, being 
able to make money and plenty of it. 

It is right to judge people from their own stand- 
point. And considering Chicago men from that one 
standpoint of money-making, there is no doubt they 
are the keenest from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 

Men go crash to bankruptcy. But there are no 
long faces. They are up again more eager than 
before. Men's brains are strained till they snap. 
Like a rocket men soar to fortune; like a squib 
they splutter to the dregs of society, and clean out 
saloons. But Chicago is so buoyant, so optimistic, 
so thrilled with virility, that only success counts. 
Failure is something that happens to other people. 

I admit the fascination of life in Chicago. It 



METHODS OF BUSINESS IN CHICAGO. 176 

brushes the stranger as it has impregnated the 
resident. Look, however, in the eye of the young 
Chicagoan of twenty-four w^ho is " plunging " in 
real estate, and you see the glint of the gambler's 
desire. Men work hard — too hard! Employers do 
not sit in their offices grumbling at the evils of trade 
unions. Partners don't play cricket; they do not 
hunt ; they have no week-ends in the country. They 
have their shirt sleeves up from seven in the morning 
till six at night. If trade unions are in their way they 
set about to smash them. They give better wages and 
wider opportunities to non-union men. They talk to 
the men straight. There is no sentiment on either 
side. " Duty " is not a word in the American business 
dictionary : " Dollars " is. They don't talk to men 
about what is right and fair. They talk to them 
on how they can make more dollars. They don't 
whine about losing trade. If there is trade to be got 
they've to get it, and never mind who goes smash. 

Chicago is the city where, if you are a dullard 
and have no ambition above being a clerk or a sales- 
man, the wages are less than in England. But 
Chicago is the city of the strenuous life. There are 
no bounds to accomplishment save a man's own 
ability. It is the clever man who wins. 

In ten years the number of factories in Chicago 
has almost doubled. The increase in business in the 
same time is from 135 million pounds to over 160 
millions. Wages have increased 10 per cent.; cost 
of food has increased 40 per cent. The average wage 
for all Chicago — poor women who get a penny a 
pair for sewing trousers, and managers of firms who 



176 AMERICA AT WORK. 

get £20,000 a year — is about 38s. a week. House 
rent in Chicago is three times as much as in a large 
British provincial town. 

Chicago is the best city in the world to achieve 
success in. It is the worst city in the world if the 
fates are against you. 

And why is it that a man in Chicago, if he has 
energy, brains, and good constitution, can make a 
fortune in ten years ? Atmosphere has much to do 
with it — the air is so stimulating. The mixture of 
races, which spells alacrity of mind, and the fact 
that the mixture is among those who have had the 
courage to do and dare, and make the plunge, 
whether from Germany or Ireland, counts for much. 

Environment is a factor. No man can crawl if 
everybody else is running. If he is not to be 
trampled to death he must run also. More than 
all, necessity must be reckoned. All the Chicago 
millionaires went to Chicago as poor boys. They 
became prosperous because they had to. 

" Had to! " " Have to! " — put the phrase as you 
will — is the real secret of success. 

One day I was chatting with a millionaire, a man 
who landed in Philadelphia from Hamburg on an 
emigrant ship, and I said, " Have you ever thought 
what was the cause of your becoming successful ? " 

'* Often," he replied. 

" And what was it ? " I pursued. 

" Poverty," was the laconic answer. " Poverty 
is the greatest blessing a young fellow can have. It 
makes a man of him." 



CHAPTER XV. 

NIAGARA IN HARNESS. 

FIVE years ago I sat for four days looking at the 
Falls ; disappointed at first, then curious ; then 
wide-eyed ; then filled with a great wonder that 
grew into an awful dread as the terrible majesty of 
that avalanche of water laid hold of me while I 
stood drenched in mist, with thunder in my ears, and 
a hundred rainbows curving like frisky dolphins be- 
fore my eyes as the breeze threw the spray into the 
sunshine. 

On a beautiful September day I sat again on 
the same spot. It was still the fairyland of wonder 
with a giant geni as king. I had no desire to climb 
into oilskins and brave the Cave of the Winds. The 
adventurous little vessel " Maid of the Mist," that 
goes dipping prettily and impudently into the froth 
of the tumult, touched no lingering chord of daring 
in me. 

The blandishments of photographers who wanted 
to photograph me with Niagara as a background 
— the finite posing before the infinite — were un- 
successful. 

For I was filled with a big regret. I wanted to be 
certain of being alive in a hundred years. I wanted 
to see Niagara in 2002. 

There is the sweep of water, green at the lips, 

M 



178 AMERICA AT WORK. 

white and misty at the beard. There is the boom, 
the tumble of a mountain, there is the swirl of foam, 
and then the placidity of death as the Niagara River, 
buffeted with its fall, sore and winded, must rest 
awhile before it gathers strength again, and throwing 
dishevelled hair of waves to the black rocks of the 
gorges, and shrieking like the Valkyrie, tears in 
spume of anger till Nirvana is reached in the bosom 
of Lake Ontario. 

But all this is not the really wonderful thing 
to-day. Much less will it be the wonderful thing a 
hundred years to come. 

Man has grasped Niagara by the beard — only a 
few hairs, but tight, and Niagara is doing what man 
directs. A few years more — ten, twenty, fifty — and 
the Geni of Waters will be the humble slave. I 
would like to see that day. I would like to see the 
power of Niagara moving this way, that way, just 
as man may direct by the touch of an electric button. 
That is why, as I sat there — having seen but a thread 
thrown about Niagara's strength, a tiny 50,000 horse- 
power — I regretted that the picture of a century to 
come will not be for eyes of mine to see. 

In the City of Buffalo, nigh thirty miles away, I 
had sat in my hotel reading and writing beneath the 
glow of an electric lamp. The power that furnished 
that light was Niagara. I went to the theatre, radiant 
with electric light — from Niagara. All the streets, 
the houses, the hotels, the churches, get the power 
that furnishes light — from Niagara. Hundreds 
of miles of electric cars screech and dance through 
towns and along highways. Niagara drives them. 



NIAGARA IN HARNESS. 179 

By the edge of those highways, with sudden 
sweeps across fields and over broken country, I saw 
fat black cables stretching to this city, that town, 
to these works, those works, carrying the power of 
Niagara a distance of sixty miles. 

Steam boilers to provide power to drive machin- 
ery — what an antiquated notion that seems ! What 
are a thousand steam boilers in power compared 
with a passing brush from Niagara ? 

Sitting in a trolley car I rode at almost express 
speed — Niagara was the force that shot the car 
onward^for twenty miles from Buffalo to where a 
bit of Niagara was harnessed. The day was 
autumnal, with a touch of acid in the sweet atmo- 
sphere, clearing the palate, brightening the eye, and 
making the world a good place to live in. There 
were wooden shanties of villages, bedraggled and 
untidy — some day, but more than a hundred years 
away, I fear, America may have pretty villages, 
and not merely gew-gaw villas, which is the 
American idea of village repose — and long, tree- 
clasped avenues with the leafage ruddy and warm. 
On the left was Niagara Eiver, broad and serene; 
behind, the smoke of Buffalo and black monsters 
of elevators; ahead, over the trees, white mist 
rising to the blueness of heaven — the breath of 
Niagara ! 

I got off at a low built, wide stretching, grey 
stone factory-looking place. There was the muffled 
buzz of mighty machinery. But two things struck 
me. Everything was clean, and the place had no 
chimney. 



180 AMERICA AT WORK. 

This was the power-house of the Niagara Falls 
Power Company.* 

The place was nearly a mile from the Falls, but 
alongside the river, and the waters were already 
gathering their strength for the great leap. In a 
sort of courtyard was what looked but the mouth 
of a canal. It was two hundred feet wide, and nar- 
rowed towards the end. It lapped in a little of the 
river, just a sip of the flood, as a cat would lap a 
dairy pan of milk. The canal looked a " cul-de-sac." 
Yet the water was moving in a steady stretch of 
four miles an hour. It was overflowing into ten 
huge tubes, and fell gulpingly, with a weird splash, 
just 135 feet. Four hundred and forty cubic feet of 
water a second fell down each tube. It fell to dark- 
ness. It would not come to light again for over a 
mile, and then below the Falls. Mouths in the rocks 
there belched the water to the stream beneath. But 
each rush of water had done its work. Each of those 
ten tubes carried the power to drive one of the ten 
5,000 horse-power dynamos. 

I got into a lift. Down, down I sank, passing ten 
long galleries of machinery and blinking electric 
lights, till the pit was reached. An official gave a 
tug at a trap door. The ears were smitten with an 
angry roar. There was the water, fury impelled, 
racing seethingly, only a foot below. 

There were the ten turbines generating electric 
power. The water passed them with an upward 
thrust — ingeniously, for friction was decreased, and 

* Whilst this volume waf? passing through the press the 
power-house was destroyed by fire. 



NIAGARA IN HARNESS. 181 

weight on the bearings was lessened. The engines 
were tuned, as it were, to 5,000 horse-power. 

When the rush of the torrent becomes stronger 
the extra power works an automatic governor, and 
the automatic governor regulates the inflow of water. 
The governor is a sort of bearing rein on a spirited 
horse. The water is ready to dash at a rate which 
would send the machinery flying in splinters. It is 
allowed to go with the strength of 5,000 horses, and 
no faster. The constant quiver of the governor is 
the striving of the water to show what a force it has, 
and yet itself supplies the check so that the force 
may be regular. 

Factories rise in storeys from the ground surface 
upwards. The Niagara Power Station digs ten 
storeys into the earth. Why ? Because it is necessary 
to get a tumble of water, and because, when winter 
grips Niagara Eiver with ice, water can be drawn^ 
from beneath the frosted shield. That is why the 
station seems only one storey high. 

I went into the great hall on the ground level. It 
was big, airy, and clean, as though it were a giant 
model of a real thing. Standing in rows were ten 
dynamos. Such dynamos! 

They were as big as the conning towers on first- 
class warships, black and sinister. The sound was 
like the wrath of ten million unhoused hornets. It 
was a buzz with the sing of a knife cutting through. 
Each dynamo weighed 75,000 pounds; each gener- 
ated an alternating current at a pressure of 2,200 
volts, and at the rate of twenty-five cycles a second. 

So uniform was the song of those ten whirling 



182 AMERICA AT WORK. 

giants that in a couple of minutes, when my ears 
became accustomed, the feeling of silence somehow 
took possession of me. There was something eerie 
about the scene. Over in a corner sat a raw youth 
reading a newspaper. I saw a man some way down 
the hall rubbing a piece of greasy waste over a small 
dynamo used for exciting currents. Another man 
was idling about, but with an eye on the generators. 
That was all. 

There was Niagara in the grip of machinery, 
giving power to work railroads, to drive mills, to 
light towns, and practically nobody to attend! There 
were no furnaces, no stoking, no boilers. The place 
was as cool as an art gallery. Everything was spot- 
less. Everything was driving at high speed. 

Fifty thousand horse-power was being generated. 
But there was smoothness everywhere — it seemed the 
apotheosis of electric machinery; and they say 
electricity is yet in its infancy ! 

The dynamos not only provide 50,000 horse-power 
to distribute for sixty miles round about, but do 
other things to save labour even in regard to them- 
selves. All the machinery is oiled automatically. 
If cleaning is needed, it requires but the pressing of 
a button, and a rush of compressed air clears every 
particle of grime awa3^ 

The whole thing is worked by the pressing of 
buttons. Push in one button, and compressed air 
switches one of those 5,000 horse-power dynamos 
into silence. Let your little daughter of five pull a 
toy-like lever, and she has removed the harness from 
Niagara, and the machinery with a throb and a pant 



NIAGARA IN HARNESS. 183 

will settle to rest. Let her pull the lever again, and 
millions of gallons of water that would have leapt 
over the rocks go down those ten great tubes and pro- 
vide power that is actually bringing towns into 
existence, that is causing manufacturers to bring 
their plants from far off and set them within reach 
of Niagara, a power which illuminates a city, drives 
hundreds of trolley cars, and abolishes boilers and 
furnaces from fifty factories in the country round. 

There are other companies that have harnessed a 
little of Niagara, but I mention the Niagara Falls 
Power Company because it is the giant with a 
capital of piled-up millions, but has yet paid no 
dividend because the policy is far-reaching. The 
profits have been enormous ; yet every dollar has gone 
to the further development of the company's plans. 

Niagara Falls a year or two ago was but a 
village of hotels and souvenir shops, living on the 
constant throng of tourists. Niagara Falls is now a 
big manufacturing town. Many thousands of horse- 
power are used in the workshops of the town, all 
supplied by Niagara. 

I confess that when I first went to see the har- 
nessing it was with qualms. I expected to find the 
grandeur of the avalanche marred, and the torrent 
diminished. That was an idle fear. What is taken 
from the falls is a spoonful from a bucket. It is 
taken a mile above the cataract itself. To turn the 
falls to commercial value raised visions of grimy, 
smoke-smeared factories. There I had forgotten. 
Factories are springing up, but they are clean, well- 
built, and they have no chimneys. There can be no 



184 AMERICA AT WORK. 

smoke. A cable runs past, and from that is tapped 
all the power required to drive the machinery. 

The Niagara Falls Power Company has the right, 
under a charter, to take sufficient water from the 
upper stretch of Niagara Eiver to produce 200,000 
horse-power. At present it uses one quarter of that 
power ; within this year it will be using half ; it is 
inevitable that before long it will use every allow- 
able ounce, and be seeking more. 

I have said the company is long-sighted. Here is 
an instance. It has acquired about two miles of 
river frontage, and over eleven hundred acres of 
adjoining land. All this is reserved for the location 
of industries that will use electric power. Again: 
When the company started, it — or the distributing 
companies dependent on it — intimated it would 
charge so much for installation of power or electric 
light, and then so much a year, and the people could 
use as much or as little as they liked. Nowhere in 
America was electricity so cheap. When everybody 
had got nicely fitted it was announced the electricity 
would be measured by meter and charged for accord- 
ingly. I asked one big firm what effect that had on 
them. The answer was : " Under the old plan, when 
we could use what we liked, we were careless. Under 
the new system we are careful. We now shut off 
power, and we shut off light, whenever not wanted. 
We don't use half of what we did before. But we pay 
twice as much for it. Oh, yes, that's a smart com- 
pany. They know we are not likely to go to the great 
expense of putting in a fresh installation and going 
to another company." 



NIAGARA IN HARNESS. 185 

Another instance: a residential village, called 
Echota, has been laid out close by, especially for the 
employees of tenant companies. The houses are neat 
and bright, the streets broad and clean, the lighting 
is free. There is an inducement to workpeople to 
live there. Ergo, there is an inducement for firms 
to start in the locality where, comparatively speak- 
ing, there is no vast expenditure for acquiring driv- 
ing power, and no necessity to build houses for the 
work-people. 

I looked round the district to see what works were 
benefited by the harnessing of Niagara. There is a 
paper-mill turning out 120 tons of paper a day. The 
water for household consumption in the town of 
Niagara Falls is distributed by pumps electrically 
driven. One firm uses 5,000 horse-power for the pro- 
duction of aluminium by an electrolytic process. 
Several big electro-chemical companies use it. A 
hook and eye and fastener company has all its 
machinery plied by electricity. At Tonawanda, half 
way between Buffalo and Niagara, a railroad line 
running to Lockport, about twenty-five miles off, uses 
electricity for its engines. The public schools are 
ventilated with fans driven by the same electricity. 

In the City of Buffalo itself I visited the main 
distributing station, supplj^ing light to the streets 
and residences and power to drive the magnificent 
cars. The great elevators by the river edge are 
worked b}?" electricity. The horse-power is divided 
into so many units ; the touch of a button sets this 
or that motor working ; grain and cereals are swung 
--out of the ships that have traversed the great lakes, 



186 AMERICA AT WORK. 

stores the produce, and at the right time loads the 
railroad cars for distribution over the eastern States. 
The machinery in the office of one of Buffalo's news- 
papers is driven by the same electricity. Several big 
iron and steel and general manufacturing works use 
electricity instead of steam. There is a place called 
the Schoelikopi Building, tenanted by a crowd of 
small manufacturers. In the basement are three 
motors. The manufacturers use what power they 
want, and turn off the tap, as it were, when they 
want no more. There is no cost of keeping a boiler. 
A firm of biscuit and cake manufacturers now do 
by the pulling of a switch what required a double 
shift of men maintaining steam and running the 
engine. At the Buffalo dry docks, where steel vessels 
for the great lakes are built, the riveting, the shear- 
ing, and the punching is all done by electricity. 

And so on and so on through a catalogue of 
works. There are no furnaces, no boilers, no smoke. 
A man starts the motors in the morning ; he switches 
them off in the evening. Nothing more. 

And it is but a wisp of the rushing waters of 
Niagara that does it all. 

Across the river, on British soil, is the Canadian 
Niagara Power Company, erecting ten motors of 
10,000 horse-power each. Another concern, the 
Ontario Power Company, is about to raise a plant 
of 100,000 horse-power. Hamilton, forty miles away, 
will be utilising Niagara within three years. Within 
ten years the streets of Toronto, nearly ninety miles 
off, will be lit with electricity generated by Niagara 

As I saw what was being done, how what is little 



NIAGARA IN HARNESS. 187 

other than a sluice from a river is revolutionising 
and cheapening methods of production, I felt en- 
thusiasm for the future begin to steal over me. But 
there is enough marvellous reality arranged for 
immediate years to take interest out of mere brain- 
spun pictures. 

I talked to a man who had taken part in the 
first move towards harnessing Niagara. People at 
first were sceptical, conservative, inclined to hang 
back. The work has now jumped beyond what may 
be called the experimental stage. In the last five 
years a wonderful change has come over the country- 
side. Not only are old-fashioned works discarding 
steam and adopting electricity, but whole businesses 
are being transferred from other parts of America 
to the banks of Niagara Eiver, where cheap power 
can be secured. Within ten years Niagara will be 
furnishing a minimum energy of 500,000 horse- 
power. 

Do we realise what half a million horse-power 
means ? One horse-power is the energy requisite to 
lift 33,000 lb. one foot per minute. All Buffalo City, 
with its electric cars, factories, elevators, lighting, 
and the rest, only uses 25,000 horse-power. 

Already millions of American dollars are ready 
to be thrown into schemes for further using Niagara 
to man's benefit. Were every work-shop, every 
house, every plant within forty miles of Niagara to 
use electric energy it is computed some 300,000 horse- 
power would be necessary. Schemes are now on foot 
for providing 500,000 horse-power. 

And that is just a point which brings out the 



188 AMERICA AT WORK. 

difference between the Briton of to-day and the 
American of to-day. The Briton would supply the 
power as it is required, and then tardily. The 
American provides the power, and is then ready to 
offer it so cheaply that men will transfer their works 
from other regions so that they may use it. The 
supply will create the demand. 

Are there no limits to carrying Niagara's power ? 
Will it some day kill pigs in Chicago and toss you 
by elevator to the thirty-second storey of Park Eow 
Building in New York ? At present there are limits. 
The price of copper decides them. After about a hun- 
dred miles the cost of the copper cable is such that the 
charge made for the electric power would be greater 
than steam-generated power. But there are those 
that believe that, on the Marconi system, the day is 
not far off when the power of Niagara will be thrown 
practically any distance without the use of wires at 
all. 

The certain future, however, of the country round 
Niagara, on United States and on British soil, is no 
industrial dream. Niagara Falls, a wonder and a 
picture, is ceasing to be a holiday site ; it is becom- 
ing a worker. Its energy is boundless. And a hun- 
dred years from now, when electricity has got out 
of its infancy and Niagara is harnessed to its last 
pound, what will the region round about look like? 
When I. sat in the spray, and my ears were numbod 
with the roar of crashing waters, I put that question 
to myself, and again I regretted I would not be there 
to see. 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE AMERICAN WORKING MAN. 

HE is part British, part German, part Irish, and 
the other part of him is tinctured with poly- 
glot Swede, Italian, and French-Canadian. 
His pride is to own a good broad-sounding English 
Saxon name, except when he owns a Scotch name, 
and then he has " a guid conceit o' hissel," 
knows Bums by heart, reads Ian Maclaren and 
J. M. Barrie, and dresses his sons in kilts. 

The British-American is proud of his forebears. 
All other Americans are " Dutchmen," or " Dagos," 
or — well, this paper would blush pink if I wTote 
how he speaks of the Irish. 

The American working man is a cross-breed ; he 
is transplanted f ron one soil to another ; he is reared 
in a hot-house atmosphere that makes him bright, 
alert, inventive. He is all nerve, and his womenkind 
are all nerves. 

There is a greater difference between British and 
American working men than is thought. We would 
notice it more if we spoke different languages. The 
American generally treats the English language 
badly. His grammar is as crooked as the tower of 
Pisa, and he avoids the use of the letter *' u " in 
colour, favour, humour, savour, and such words, as 
though it were inoculated with hydrophobia. 

He has a pretty taste in simile. He is witty and 



190 AMERICA AT WORK. 

playful, just exaggerative enough to make the con- 
trast striking. As a journalist I would give two 
fingers off my left hand to have the wealth of 
imagery with which the average American decorates 
his speech. He swears. It is not the stereotyped oath 
of the London 'busman, but original, sparkling, and 
sarcastic. He chews and he spits. He prefers cigars 
to pipes, and pays 2Jd. each for them. They are 
green, and, to the British tongue, vicious. If he is 
where he cannot smoke he bites two inches off a rank 
cigar and chews it. No place is sacred to him. 

He is bigger, better made, deeper-chested, clearer- 
skinned than the Englishman. He looks healthier. 
But he isn't nearly as strong. An ill-formed, 
scraggy-legged, puke-faced, no-chested Cockney will, 
in the matter of stamina, knock the American into 
a wreck. 

Though the simile is a little strained, I might 
say the American is the racehorse in work, while the 
Briton is the carthorse. The racehorse will go faster, 
but the carthorse will carry a bigger weight and 
stand more racket. The American lacks patience 
and doggedness. He works under excitement with 
strong impetus. Alongside him the British working 
man is a hobbler. But the American is soon played 
out. That is why, in big industrial concerns, you 
seldom see an old man. 

As a rule, he is a tall fellow, loose in the limb, 
and a mixer. A mixer, in America, is one who 
readily mixes with his fellows. He is cheery and 
good-natured. The good-nature, the streak of 
humour that is in him, goes some way to counteract 



THE AMERICAN WORKING MAN. 191 

the strain under which he works. See the gates of 
an English factory open at mid-day, and out will 
stream a crowd of men, most of them serious visaged, 
a little anxious, hurrying to dinner. See the gates 
of an American factory open, and out come a throng 
of grown-up school boys, " jollying " and " joshing," 
and taking life easily. 

If you want to find the worn man, you must find 
the head of the business. He is the captain, the man 
who has all the responsibility. There is no sparkle 
in his eyes, and there are lines on the cheek, and 
often tufts of grey hair over the ears. 

Notice the contrast between the two lands. In 
Britain the healthy, fresh-faced man is usually the 
employer, and the weary, sad-eyed man is the em- 
ployee. In America the employee is filled with frolic. 
It is the employer who is tired — just tired, just worn 
out, just living to work, racked with worry, as many 
a man confesses. 

An American working man is sprightlier than 
his fellow on this side. There is the spice of adven- 
ture in him, and he will cease to be an engineer and 
become a saloon keeper, and stop his business as a 
watch-maker and take to farming, or cease to be a 
parson and branch out as a " drummer " {Anglice, 
commercial traveller) just because the fancy touches 
him. You don't hear, " Well, I've got a wife and 
children, and for their sakes I put up with a good 
deal." The American will put up with nothing. He 
is just as good as his employer. He may be a bigger 
employer himself in five years. He is " a free-born 
citizen of the United States," and his desire to show 



192 AMERICA AT WORK. 

his independence frequently causes him to be objec- 
tionable. He is rude, however, without any inten- 
tion of being offensive. It is just a way he has. He 
means no more than the Yorkshire operative whom 
the Londoner accuses of being brusque. 

The American gets a real honest joy out of work- 
ing. He is optimistic. He has a magnificent belief 
in his own abilities. Whatever he reads in the news- 
papers about work is to prove what a fine fellow the 
American is and what a sluggard the European is. 
He likes that. He won't buy a paper that doesn't 
tell him he belongs to God's own country. There is 
enthusiasm in the air. Success is within the reach 
of anyone who has the brains. 

In the workshops the pace is marvellous. I saw 
how the whirl of machinery, the exquisite mechanism 
which does away with labour, the music of the 
machine, made the men throb with ardour. 

There was lots of pride. The men loved doing 
things quickly- If a specially dexterous workman 
turned out twice as much as other men, there was no 
talk about his going easier to keep level with the 
others or the employer would think they ought all to 
turn out as much ! I lost no opportunity of investiga- 
ting whether there was a tendency to restrict output 
to balance wages. To say I never heard of such a 
thing in America would be inaccurate. It does exist, 
and I believe the tendency is growing. But, in a 
generalisation, I can say it hardly exists. A clever 
workman earning high wages causes emulation; 
other men look up to him with admiration, and there 
is a sporfmg effort to do more work, a struggle, with 



THE AMERICAN WORKING MAN. 1&3 

fun and skill in it, waged for the extra dollars it 
means at the week-end. 

Man for man, in the quality of the work turned 
out, the Briton is the superior of the American. But 
these are times — quite as much in England as in 
America — when quickness, cheapness, temporary 
effectiveness, count. 

A legitimate criticism made against American 
goods is tliat they won't last as long as British. But 
they last long enough for their purpose; they are 
cheaper, and new ones can be bought. That is why 
labour-saving machinery plays such a part in 
America. 

I believe the American is not such a good artisan 
as his cousin on the English side of the water, chiefly 
because he is not called upon to turn out the same 
quality. The skilled workman is not required. 
What is required is, first, the man who can devise 
fresh labour-saving machinery ; second, the labourer 
who will do one little routine thing year after year, 
and do it expeditiously. And in both of these things 
the American is ahead of the Briton. 

Though the American working man gets more 
wages, yet by extra dexterity and the use of machin- 
ery he turns out things that can compete successfully 
with their counterparts produced in Europe, where 
the wages are lower, but where machinery is only 
an aid, and not the chief factor. The American em- 
ployer, therefore, gets his labour cheaper in the net 
result than does the British employer. 

Again, a British employer is often at the mercy 
of his workmen, who may insist on increased wages 

N 



194 AMERICA AT WORK. 

when he has a contract on hand — though probably 
he has only succeeded in getting the contract at a 
price based on existing wages — because he is unable 
to get other men to take their place if a strike be 
threatened. His is a skilled trade. The American, 
however, can often snap his fingers at his men, be- 
cause if there is any trouble others can be brought in, 
and they, in a few weeks, with their American adapt- 
ability, will pick up sufficient knowledge to produce 
by machine what can be done by the skilled British 
working man only after years of training. 

Trade unions are strong, and their strength is in- 
creasing. On the whole, the way they are regarded 
and conducted in America is more sensible than 
with us. Generally speaking, with the usual excep- 
tions, union men do not refuse to work with non-union 
men. Because a man does not belong to his trade 
union no dead set i& made against him. It is a free 
country ; a man can do as he likes. He is possibly 
regarded as a fool for not belonging. But there is no 
question of strike^ Unionists and non-unionists 
work side by side. 

On tlie other hand, employers do not make a set 
against union men and refuse to employ a man who 
is a trade unionist. They have not much need to 
bother their heads about trade union difficulties, 
because in the majority of trades they call in out- 
siders, boys, who would do the work almost as well 
in a month. What the American employer wants is 
smart, energetic workmen, and he does not care 
whether they are unionists or non-unionists. 

In a word, the industrial progress of America is 



THE AMERICAN WORKING MAN. 195 

a progress of machinery. In the last fifty years 
the number of wage earners has multiplied five and 
a half times, wages have multiplied ten times, but, 
most remarkable of all, the value of products has 
multiplied thirteen times. This means that now a 
workman turns out a product two and a third times as 
valuable as his predecessor did half-a-century ago. 
That is a fact of which he is pardonably proud. 

The end of inventing labour-saving machines is 
not yet. It proceeds at a marvellous rate. Hundreds 
of thousands of workmen are displaced. They move 
to other jobs. Frequently, however, the introduction 
into a firm of a new machine that does twice as much 
work as the old machine leads to an increase of 
workpeople instead of a falling off. The firm is able 
to turn out so cheaply that they get ahead of others in 
competition, and the mass of orders comes to them. 

A complaint by English manufacturers is that 
their workpeople resent the introduction of large 
quantities of labour-saving machinery. That com- 
plaint is never made in America. Facts are 
accepted, and the work-people know perfectly well 
that machinery is really best for a big trade. 
Another thing is that so many of the inventions, 
the little changes, come from the workmen them- 
selves. 

I have said to many an American manufacturer, 
" Are the improvements suggested by your work- 
men?" The answer has invariably been, "Why, 
certainly ; that's what pays best. Any boy can do 
the work required, but what we want are brains 
which devise newer and better methods." 



196 AMERICA AT WORK. 

I have put the same question to English manu- 
facturers, and the reply has been, " We hardly ever 
get a suggestion from one of our workpeople." 

I am loth to think the British workman lacks 
the alertness of brain which recognises advantages. 
But the different relationship between employers and 
men has something to do with what I have narrated. 
With us there is a lack of that freedom, even cor- 
diality, that exists in America. An English work- 
man stands just a little in awe of his employer. He 
is afraid of being thought presumptuous ; above all, 
he wants to avoid being snubbed. 

This is what I have seen in America. An employer 
who was taking me round his works at Cleveland 
stopped to criticise the way a man was doing some- 
thing. The man turned on him, and for five minutes 
the air scintillated with ruddy words as each tried 
to show the other was an ass. The workman was 
certainly impudent. I stood on one side and smiled. 
Afterwards I said to the employer, " No master in 
England would allow a man to answer him back as 
that man answered you." 

" That's all right," I got reply. " I would have 
thought nothing of him if he had done just what I 
wanted. But you see he had an opinion of his own ; 
he has ideas, and that is the useful man in works 
like these." 

A workman calls his employer " boss," but does 
not look upon him as his master. *' Master " is a 
word you never hear. The relationship is almost 
that of partners, but with not the tittle of an ounce 
of sentiment in it. Each party is pushing his hardest 



THE AMERICAN WORKING MAN. 1&7 

for most money, often becoming antagonistic, but 
generally level-headed, and having straight talks 
with the other, and not losing sight of the point 
that they are both in the same business, and that 
they cannot hurt each other without hurting them- 
selves. Employers don't keep their men at a dis- 
tance, and the men have not the slightest hesitation 
about approaching the " boss." 

The American working man is bound by no 
traditions. He works hard, but he doesn't know 
he is working hard except by comparison with 
Europeans, and Europeans he guesses to be ** back 
numbers," and too slow to be buried. 

He hustles. Everybody hustles. An English- 
man, who declares he is not such a fool as to kill 
himself with a pace like that, finds himself uncon- 
sciously, but nevertheless most certainly, hustling by 
the time he has been a few months in the country. 
Hustling is in the air. I never met an American 
who did not prefer to do things at a rush and under 
severe pressure. To suggest that the Englishman, by 
going slower, produced better work, simply awoke a 
contemptuous smile. Anyway he is always ready to 
work hard. He loves the dollars. The young 
mechanics throng the technical schools of America. 
College men go into works and labour alongside 
illiterate immigrants, knowing watchful eyes are on 
them, and that progress will be rapid if they are any 
good. 

Life is hard. Many workmen go to the wall. 
The principles of work are materialistic. There is 
no philanthropy, no consideration for old servants. 



198 AMERICA AT WORK. 

It is a struggle for the survival of the industrially 
fittest. 

The British workman I know thinks no small 
beer of himself; but he is modesty itself alongside 
the American. Across the Atlantic the American 
is first, and the rest of the world nowhere. He is 
a great " blow-hard " — to use his own word. 

Wages can only be reckoned by their purchasing 
power. Therefore, while the American working man 
undoubtedly earns more than the Briton, he has to 
work harder, and he has to pay more for the neces- 
sities of life — in the case of house rent about three 
times as much. Of recent years wages in Chicago 
have increased 10 per cent. ; but the cost of food has 
increased 40 per cent., so the working man is worse 
off than he was five years ago. 

In a restricted way the same thing applies to all 
the United States. I have some Government figures 
before me which demonstrate that while the total 
amount now earned by workers is 23.2 per cent, 
ahead of ten years ago, the number of workers has 
increased 25.2 per cent. The average wage has de- 
creased 1.5 per cent, in ten years, and the general 
increase of price for articles of consumption has in- 
creased 1.8 per cent. So there is a decrease of 3.B 
per cent, in real wages, or the purchasing power of 
a day's work. Striking an average on the last ten 
years' figures, I find, taking America as a whole, that 
wages are on the decrease, whilst the cost of food is 
on the increase. 



CHAPTEE XVII. 

THE MANUFACTURE OF BOOTS AND SHOES. 

NOT one per cent, of the people in Great Britain 
fail to pay a toll of some sort to America for 
the boots they wear. If not manufactured 
wholly or in part in the United States, the boots 
are in some way or other dependent on machinery 
made in America, or the makers pay a royalty 
to an American patentee. You cannot enter a single 
shoe factory in England without finding that the 
principal labour-saving machinery is American. 

American boot and shoe shops are to be found 
in most British towns of any size. If you take a 
walk along Eegent Street, London, you can see seven 
shops selling American shoes. 

English folk have no predilection in favour of 
things American. But they have taken to wearing 
boots from the other side of the Atlantic because 
they are either better or cheaper. American shoe 
factories are bursting with work ten months in the 
year. English factories are running short time, and 
some have to put up their shutters. The Massachu- 
setts shoe operative is making fifty shillings a week 
with almost constant work. The men of North- 
ampton make fifteen shillings, and are doing well if 
they make twenty-five shillings. The export shoe 
trade of America to Great Britain is bounding ahead. 
Take the Board of Trade returns for 1902 as evidence. 



200 AMERICA AT WORK. 

It is only five or six years since American snoes 
began to appear in considerable numbers in English 
shop windows. There was a serene smile, with a 
glimmer of contempt behind it, at so foolish a sug- 
gestion that American competition would ever make 
a huge British industry quiver. The manufacturers 
of Northampton, of Leicester, of Leeds, said it was 
a passing fad, and that one winter would demon- 
strate to Englishmen how unserviceable American 
boots were. But it didn't. 

When the invasion had set in and the English 
maker began to be really hurt he showed an inclina- 
tion to throw the blame on the home workman. He 
accused him of being unsteady and slow. Also he 
decided pernicious trade unions had much to do with 
his being unable to compete with the American. They 
restricted the output. After that he realised that 
labour-saving machinery accounted for more than 
he reckoned. To get level he began adopting Ameri- 
can methods. Then the British shoe operative, seeing 
the introduction of contrivances which would make 
shoes cheaper and quicker, and naturally with fewer 
workmen, went on strike as a holy crusade against 
the bread being taken out of his mouth. The men in 
one town " demonstrated," they paraded, they hooted, 
they threw mud at works where American labour- 
saving machinery had been introduced. 

The English manufacturer was dull witted ; the 
English operative was stupid and short-sighted. 

Meanwhile American manufacturers were turn- 
ing out a first-class article, neat of shape, and plea- 
sant to the foot. When the American understood 



MANUFACTURE OF BOOTS AND SHOES. 201 

that a boot one size might be just a little bit too tight, 
and the next size just a little bit too loose, he didn't 
say, " Well, those are our sizes," but he took to mak- 
ing half sizes. He was adaptive. To-day every 
American factory turns out shoes in half sizes. 
Again, the American manufacturer realised — which, 
som^ehow, the English manufacturer did not, till 
afterwards — that everj^body has not the same pro- 
portioned foot. So now each size boot is made in 
half a dozen different widths. And that is the 
secret of the American boot fitting well. English- 
men have had to fit their feet to new boots ; and we 
can all recall experiences of that operation. 

" It pinches a bit on the instep," you may have 
said. You remember the reply : " That will be all 
right when you've worn them a few days." Ameri- 
cans taught English makers to turn out a boot that 
would be all right at the start. 

In London I said to an English dealer, " Why 
don't you have English boots in half sizes and vary* 
ing widths, like the American. You would be able 
to give a better fit." 

'* Yes," he replied, " but just think of the enor- 
mous stock I should have to carry! " 

I went round the corner to an American shop. 
" Have half -sizes and varying widths much to do 
with the big sale of American shoes? " I asked. 
He smiled at my apparently puerile inquiry. " Well, 
yes, I guess so, sir," he said. " We carry four 
or five times the stock an English dealer does; 
but then, we sell six or seven times as many 
boots." 



202 AMERICA AT WORK. 

There, in the very heart of London, I got a side- 
light of the characteristics of the two nations. The 
American was prepared to suit his customer, appre- 
ciating that that meant increased trade. The English- 
man would not have a big stock because he had not 
a big sale. I fancy an hour's talk would not have 
proven to him the relationship of cause and effect. 

Now nowhere in the course of my American 
journey ings did I find anything more interesting 
than the boot and shoe factories at Brockton, Lynn, 
and Haverhill, in Massachusetts. 

First of all I tried to weigh in the balance the 
respective merits of the American manufacturer 
and the English manufacturer, the American work- 
man and the English workman. 

In regard to the manufacturers I met, they were, 
in business capabilities, infinitely superior to those 
in England. Let there be no mistake about that. 
They were awake. They had all the keenness of 
their brains focussed on their work. They knew all 
about the business from top to bottom. They wanted 
the very latest machinery, and never mind the price 
of the machinery that had to be thrown out to make 
room for it. They wanted each man to put the last 
ounce of his energy into his work ; they wanted every 
machine driven to the ripping point. They had their 
wits constantly at play to save the cost of a few 
workmen, to get work done by boys that had formerly 
been done by men ; to get out an article not only good 
but cheap, and so " scoop " the market. 

In regard to the merits of the workmen of the 
two countries, I will say this : if I wanted a pair of 



MANUFACTURE OF BOOTS AND SHOES. 203 

boots made in honest, sterling workmanship — suit- 
able, for instance, for climbing in Switzerland — and 
did not consider the price, I would choose the English 
bootmaker, because as an artisan he has not his equal 
in the world. The boots he can produce under such 
circumstances are beyond compare. 

But if I wanted to name a man who had sense to 
understand w^hat the strife in present day commer- 
cialism really meant, who knew the inevitability of 
labour-saving machinery, and therefore welcomed it, 
and made the best of it, that man would not be the 
British boot operative, but it would be the American. 
To-day the English shoemaker is excellent as an 
artisan ; he is second rate as a worker. The American 
is a worker, and nothing of an artisan. 

Let me explain. American machinery has 
reached such a pitch of excellence that shoemaking 
is done by machines through a hundred operations, 
and all the man has to do is to put one part through 
a particular operation. A man will spend his whole 
life in holding up boots so that a knife can make a 
delicate curving cut on the inner part of the heel. 
He will do that with a rapidity that makes the 
Englishman a positive sluggard. But he cannot do 
anything else. He could no more fit a toe-cap nor 
attach a heel than I could. There the British shoe- 
maker is his superior. 

And there also is the dividing line — quite apart 
from alertness and dulness — between English and 
American methods. 

The American manufacturer succeeds, largely, 
because he specialises, and it was he who taught the 



204 AMEEICA AT WORK. 

English shoe manufacturer (who provides the most 
notorious instance of toddling at the tail of the 
American for ideas) how to specialise also. 

In the first place, he only makes one kind of 
article. There are practically no factories in America 
that make men's, women's and children's shoes. A 
manufacturer gets into one line and makes that kind 
of boot alone. One firm I visited made nothing but 
dainty, highly finished ladies' boots. Another firm 
made nothing but low walking shoes for ladies. 
Another made nothing but a stoutish serviceable boot 
for working women. Another made nothing but 
misses' boots — boots for girls between childhood and 
young womanhood. Another made nothing but 
ladies' shoes. 

In the United States are 551 works that turn out 
between them over 68 million pairs of men's boots 
and shoes; there are 589 establishments that turn 
out over 65 million pairs of women's boots and shoes ; 
there are 552 places that turn out over 42 million 
pairs of misses' and children's boots — each 
firm specialising on one particular kind of boot or 
shoe. 

The manufacturer benefits enormously by keep- 
ing his employees to one kind of work. He knows a 
man cannot be so expert if he is making men's boots 
to-day, women's to-morrow, and children's the day 
after as he is when his work is limited, say, to 
moulding an inner sole of a lady's walking shoe. 

Mr. Carrol D. Wright, the United States Com- 
missioner of Labour, has analysed the different 
operations through which the factory-made shoe 




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MANUFACTURE OF BOOTS AND SHOES. 205 

passes in its making, and gives the time needed to 
carry on the same operation by hand. He has 
taken a hundred as a basis. Take men's cheap 
grade, pegged boots. Hand made, they passed 
through 83 different operations ; machine made, they 
passed through 122. Hand made, only two workmen 
were employed ; machine made, there were 113. Hand 
made, the time spent in making those hundred boots 
was 1,436 hours 40 minutes. Machine made, the 
time was 154 hours 4 minutes. Hand made, the cost 
was $408 (say 16s. a pair) ; machine made, the cost 
was $35 (say Is. 6d. a pair). These are American 
prices, but they are indicative of what machinery 
has done in the cheapening of labour. And the same 
thing runs through every grade of shoe. 

It is within the last fifteen or twenty years that 
American bootmaking machinery has risen to the 
region of the marvellous. One morning I visited a 
factory a few miles outside Boston, where only first 
grade women's shoes were being made. I had not 
been ten minutes in the place before the remark 
broke from my lips, " Why, you've nothing but boys 
and girls working here." 

" That's mainly so," replied the manager. " We 
don't need many men. We don't want men who have 
had an apprenticeship. Most of the things that have 
to be done here can be picked up in a fortnight. 
Boys and girls are cheaper than men, and they work 
just as well. We've over 75,000 pairs of boots under 
construction, and we send 7,500 out every day." 

** Honestly now," I said, " suppose I put you to 
the test, how long would it take you, with the way 



206 AMERICA AT WORK. 

clear, to make a pair of boots from beginning to the 
end?" 

" Well," he replied, " we tested ourselves not long 
ago, and from the leather to the finished article, 
ready for wear, the time was just seventeen minutes." 

That may make an English manufacturer cry 
" Phew! " But everybody works on the piece system 
in America. Individual workers have to do but the 
tiniest fraction of the necessary labour. For in- 
stance, a man's medium grade calf, welt, lace shoe, 
single soles, and with soft box toes, passes through 
the hands of 371 work people, many of them girls 
and small boys. And it is not to be overlooked that 
the employment of men in the American shoe trade 
is decreasing, whilst the employment of women and 
children is on the increase. 

Let me try to convey how a saunter through a 
New England shoe factory impressed me. There 
was the great unpicturesque building humming 
like a hive with machinery. I looked down long 
aisles of w^hizzing, buzzing, screeching contrivances 
worked by boys and women, and every one of them 
doing their little part with an adroitness and alacrity 
that was amazing. There, as in other works in other 
parts of America, the suggestion that slipped into 
my mind was that a competition was on, and every- 
body was driving their hardest to earn the prize. 
I could understand people working at that rate for 
half an hour and then stop fagged and worn. What 
I could not well understand was how delicate, 
nervous young women kept at it week after week. 
Lots of them would tumble out from physical ex- 



MANUFACTURE OF BOOTS AND SHOES. 20 

haustion; but for the couple of years that the 
majority can undergo the strain, their hands move 
so swiftly that I found myself frequently dawdling, 
attracted by their speed. In these works were 
employed 1,000 women and 1,500 boys, and the 
manager told me that within the last twelve years 
the employment of women had increased quite 50 
per cent. 

From the beginning to the end I followed the 
making of the shoe. In a top room were the cutters 
{Anglice " clickers "), who were thrown tickets 
describing the shoe required. With a switch and a 
curve a machine blocked out the vamp. Another man 
shaped the vamp. Another cut the tops. The side 
linings, the stays, the facings, and all trimmings, 
were got together. Bundles were made, and a travel- 
ling screen carried them off to the fitting depart- 
ment. I saw one workman who for eighteen years 
had done nothing but cut vamps. Another had donr- 
nothing for ten years but run a machine knife round 
the edge of a rough sole. There were two gangs ol 
men working close together; one gang did nothing 
but scour heels, the other gang did nothing but shave 
heels. There was a good deal of similarity in the 
work, but under the American plan none of the men 
were ever put to the other job. 

There were 125 cutters in that room, all toiling at 
feverish speed. Yet no confusion, for when they hac 
finished they placed the sole on the travelling screen, 
and it passed on to the next room. 

The only people hurrying about were boys witt 
patterns, for though makers keep to one style, tho 



208 AMEEICA AT WORK. 

American wearer is rather fanciful in his and her 
ideas, and so constantly there are little alterations 
to tickle the liking of the public. On some bundles 
were red labels, *' Hustle," and " Special Rush," an 
indication to the employees which work they were 
to take into hand first. 

Have you ever seen buttons sewn on to ladies' 
boots by machinery ? I saw a girl throw a couple 
of handfuls of buttons into a machine as though they 
were coffee beans. She set the machine working. 
She ran the side of a boot through an opening, and 
with a ravenous clicking it had fastened on eleven 
buttons. She told me that with this machine she 
generally sewed buttons on 400 pairs of boots a day 
— 8,800 buttons in a working day. I saw another 
girl, not more than sixteen years of age, run- 
ning the edge of a boot through a clattering 
sewing machine contrivance, and quicker than 
you can mutter the name of the proverbial Jack 
Robinson holes had been made and eyelets clamped 
in. She said she got through about a thousand boots 
a day. 

A wonderful contrivance was the sewing machine. 
It has a double stitch lock, and one man can do the 
sewing of from 600 to 700 pairs of boots a day. 
Another wonderful machine was that which does the 
difficult process of " pulling over " — accurately 
centring the shoe upper on the last and securing it 
in position for the work of lasting. It is provided 
with pincers which close automatically, gripping 
the shoe upper at sides and toes. The pressing 
of a foot-lever draws the upper tight on the last, 




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MANUFACTURE OF BOOTS AND SHOES. 209 

and secures it in position by tacks automatically 
driven. 

Whether it was driving in nails, or shaving the 
heel, or emery ing the sole, everything was done by 
machinery. And a machine was not allowed to do 
only one operation. I saw one machine moulding 
the shape of soles, and it worked on three shoes at 
once. A man inserted a shoe. He gave a push 
with his foot at a lever. A mould that had just 
cast out a sole came up, and the other sole was put 
under a pressure of forty-five hundredweight. All 
he had to do was to insert the sole. The gripping, 
the pressing, the releasing, and discharging, all 
followed automatically. 

Around the works were walking ** quality " men. 
They just strolled anywhere, picking up this and 
that shoe, seeing the quality of work was all right. 
There were ** hustle " men, going about with nothing 
to do but keep people working hard, and seeing that 
particular orders were pushed ahead. There were 
** odd shoe " boys, whose duty was, when any shoes 
got out of place, or if one fell, to see they were put 
right. It was not for the workman to waste time 
putting shoes in their places. That was the function 
of the ** odd shoe " boys. 

There was no dawdling and wasting of time in 
getting to work. In the typical works I am referring 
to, a start is made at eight o'clock in the morning. 
But everybody must be within the gates at 7.55. An 
hour and a quarter is given for dinner, from noon to 
1.15. But the gates of the factory are closed at 1.10. 
Every grain of work possible is got out of the 



210 AMERICA AT WORK. 

employees. As to the wages, the men make about 
50s. a week, and women and boys make from 12s. 
upwards. 

I found in American works more economy of 
time than in England. There was more evidence of 
well-thought-out methods. The men undoubtedly 
work harder, but if a man suggests an improvement 
in a machine so that it can do twice as much work 
when the contrivance is applied, it is not expected he 
will turn out twice as much at the old pay. He will 
be met by the manufacturer and given half the 
benefit. 

The struggle in competition is fierce and merci- 
less. But I found, with exceptions, good relation- 
ship between employers and employed. Often there 
is a big cut in wages. But the men know competi- 
tion causes it, and with the masters they set their 
wits to work how to turn out more pairs of boots, 
and make up the difference that way. 

With everything done by machinery, with con- 
sequent cheapness of labour, with an eye to accom- 
modating popular fancy in the way of shape, with 
readiness to adapt himself to circumstances, with 
power to make a difficulty into an opportunity, the 
American shoe manufacturer of to-day has pitted 
his business capacity against that of his British 
cousin. 

Is he going to win the game ? Of that, however, 
I am not so sure. Just in the nick of time the 
English manufacturer has awakened from his slug- 
gish complacency, and instead of pooh-poohing the 
American has rubbed the dust out of his eyes. That 



MANUFACTURE OF BOOTS AND SHOES. 211 

has been, and will be, his only salvation. But in his 
half-hours of quiet thought does he not think there 
has been something lacking in that he himself has 
not been the man to show the world up-to-date boot 
and shoe manufacture ? 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

COAL MINING. 

MINING districts are much the same all the 
world over. When I made a trip from Pitts- 
burg, in a grimy car with cracked windows 
and unswept floor, on my way to the coal beds that 
keep to the valley of the Monongahela River, it 
almost slipped my memory I was in Pennsylvania. 
I might have been in a South Yorkshire mining dis- 
trict. The country was not good to look upon. It 
was untidy. The villages were dirty and ram- 
shackle. Indeed, when I came to make comparisons 
everything was in favour of the British mining 
village. 

A coal company owning about fifty mines in a 
stretch of ninety miles had given me leave to go 
where I liked and inspect what I liked. So I found 
myself dumped at a woe-begone cluster of wooden 
huts on the river side, where mighty barges, seem- 
ingly an acre in area, were pressed to the water edge 
with coal, waiting for the river to get in flood, and 
then in long procession, with a little tug snorting 
ahead just to give them steering way, to float for 
two thousand miles down the Mississippi to New 
Orleans. The barges were nothing but nailed planks, 
and at New Orleans would be sold for old wood, as 
it would not be profitable to tow them back. 



COAL MINING. 213 

From a cut in the hills came a drunken little 
railway track, and the shriek of an engine warned 
me of clattering coal trucks that banged and creaked 
down the valley, ran upon a platform over the river, 
and pitched the coal into the huge maw of a barge. 

Then I climbed into the cab of the engine, hot 
and greasy, and the driver with a load of empty 
trucks behind him " let her go." She was a rickety 
old engine, and kicked. When crossing a wheezy 
trestle bridge she lurched, and I expected a sudden 
descent to the brown, iron-stained bed of a dried-up 
rivulet below. The driver, a young fellow, who pro- 
ceeded to eat a cigar I handed him, was used to it 
all. "Do you ever go off the track?" I asked. 
" Not very often," was his reply. 

At heavy gradients the engine panted hard. We 
stopped for half-an-hour at a saloon so that the 
driver and fireman might drink beer. There were 
patches of houses as though thrown down anywhere. 
Where there were fences they were broken. There 
was no attempt at gardening. The women folk were 
as slatternly a lot as I have ever seen. There was no 
roadway, only a crooked humpy cart track with 
foot-deep ruts in places. 

I was about to visit a bituminous drift mine with 
no shaft, driven straight into the mountain side. 
Where the hill was too steep for the engine there 
were heavy wire ropes to haul the trucks up and 
let them down. There was a boring in the hill, and, 
as though one looked through a telescope from the 
broad end, a peep of light was to be seen far off. 
Through this tunnel a little delve in the hills was 



214 AMERICA AT WORK. 

reached. There was the heavy beat of the engines 
in the power-house. Beyond was the electric plant. 
Beyond that again the rails ran into a black mouth 
of a tunnel which swallowed a string of cars. 

This was the Beck Kun Mine, and as there is no 
fire-damp naked lights can be used. Having been 
provided with a smelly little lamp, I squatted in the 
bottom of a truck beside the superintendent of the 
mine, and away we went for a mile-and-a-half ride 
into the mountain side. 

There is always something eerie and impressive 
about a mine. On either side the reflection of the 
lamp flickers danced on the coal face. Just above 
:— that would bang the head if one dared to sit 
upright — was a roof of black rock. Once we halted, 
and the silence was like nothing that can be 
experienced in the outer world. 

We came to an opening that suggested the fur- 
nace of a great ocean liner. Bulb electric lamps 
were everywhere. The roof was staged with iron 
bars. In front were two mighty ovens, blazing 
ravenously. This was the ventilation system. My 
back was struck by waves of icy wind. I had, 
however, to hold up my hands to save my eyes from 
the scorching glare. Two men, stripped to the waist, 
their coal-dusted chests trickling with sweat, heaved 
fuel to the flames. 

On we went again, until we reached a tangle of 
cuttings, and orange tongues of flame danced from 
the little lamps fastened to the caps of the miners. 
Here, again, I was struck with the youth of the men. 
There were no old men; only a few middle-aged. 



COAL MINING. 215 

They were black with coal dust. They were not 
lacking in oaths, especially at the mules which 
brought the trucks from the workings to the 
main rail, which, it would seem, had all the vices 
but none of the virtues of the rest of the brute 
creation. 

For a quarter of a mile I stumbled along a 
stone-strewn gallery to see some electric machines at 
work. 

What a clatter! Intensify a million times the 
sudden running down of a blind, and you will 
understand something of the uproar. In what is 
called a *' room " were two young fellows with one of 
these machines. They stuck its face against the 
lower part of the coal, and pulled a lever. Imme- 
diately there whizzed a chain with a hundred teeth, 
that cut through the coal, and ate its way in for 
about six feet in two minutes. The dust was so thick 
that one was obliged literally to fight for breath. 
The machine was run back, pushed along with a 
couple of props, and set to work again. 

A machine which, under the charge of two men, 
can win ninety tons of coal a day compares well 
with the English method of working by hand with 
the pick and shovel. But these electric appliances 
can only be used in mines where there is no gas. 
Where there is gas it is customary to use pneumatic 
machines. 

" With six men using the pick we could not turn 
out as much as one of these machines and two men 
can," said the superintendent. " No," he added, 
" they are not specially trained. They are just lads 



216 AMERICA AT WORK. 

who worked in the mine and picked up the use of 
the machine." 

About 2Jd. a ton is what the men who work the 
machines are paid. The men who load the trucks — 
and they are expected to keep the ways clear and 
remove all the slate waste — get, as a rule, 2s. 3d. 
a ton. An eight-hours day is a practice. There are 
no " play days." There are no Saturday half-holi- 
days. Men work a full six days a week, and their 
wages are from £3 6s. to £3 12s. But often for a 
month, or even two months, there is no work at all. 
So the average wage falls considerably. 

While there are many shaft mines, the majority 
of the American mines are drift. An English shaft 
will sometimes be near 4,000 feet deep, but an 
American rarely goes below 200 feet. While 
Great Britain has a coal field of 9,000 square 
miles, the American coal-bed is 222,500 square 
miles. 

Man for man, the British coal miner turns out 
only 300 tons a year compared with 526 turned out 
by the American. For the same price an English 
railway company charges to carry a ton of coal an 
American line will carry six tons. Whilst an 
English truck with ten tons of coal is considered 
heavily laden, an American truck carries fifty tons. 

The method of coal working is much the same as 
in England. A tunnel is driven through the seam, 
and then chambers are opened up right and left, with 
pillars of coal left to uphold the roof, and these are 
not removed till a seam is exhausted. They are then 
gradually cut down and the coal sent to the surface, 



COAL MINING. 217 

whilst, as the work recedes toward the shaft, the roof 
is allowed to fall in. 

There are no general mining laws. Each State 
in an authority unto itself, and what is legal on one 
side of a fence is sometimes a crime on the other 
side. In Pennsylvania every mine is obliged to have 
a second means of escape should the principal shaft 
become impracticable. There are other laws, admir- 
able because they are stringent, but I regret to say 
not always put in force. The great coal-barons, as 
they are called, have various means by which they 
can be ahead of the law. Until quite recently it was 
the custom of many mines to have stores, where the 
families of the colliers traded, and on pay-day the 
money owing was deducted from the wages. This 
was the old pernicious truck system. It forced the 
miners to deal with the mine stores, often placed 
the food regulation of the district under the control 
of the coalowners, and provided a grip on the men 
themselves. Now the colliery owners are obliged to 
pay their men in coin at least once every two weeks. 
There is a law that no boy under fourteen shall 
be employed in a mine, or under twelve outside a 
mine. There are some 40,000 boys employed about 
the anthracite mines, or one in four of the total em- 
ployees, and thousands of them are obviously under 
fourteen and twelve. The employer evades responsi- 
bility by getting an affidavit from the parents that 
the child had passed the legal age, and the parents, 
eager for an extra dollar or so a week, lie readily. 
An inspector who inquired into the age of a batch 
of boys, who seemed younger than their recorded age, 



218 AMERICA AT WORK. 

told me that in nine cases out of ten cases inquired 
into there had been lying. Children of twelve are to 
be found in the Pennsylvanian mines — a cruel thing. 

A Pennsylvania mining village always looks as 
though the blessings of heaven were specially kept 
from it. 

The miners' trade unions are strong, but with 
nothing of the strength possessed by the British 
unions. Besides, the leaders have not anything like 
the confidence of the men such as Thomas Burt or 
*' Mabon " have in England and Wales. There are 
too many instances of agitators having their mouths 
closed with bundles of green-backs. That every man 
has his price is believed in by Americans. That a 
man's silence should be bought is regarded as a 
business deal. That honour should be thought so 
easily purchasable struck me as a much too common 
trait in commerce. 

Half a generation ago, if you went into a Pennsyl- 
vanian colliery, the majority of best workers would 
be found to be British. Now there are hardly any. 
I got among a body of 250 colliers, and inquired how 
many were British born. I found one — a Welshman. 
Miners to-day are chiefly Hungarians and Poles, 
and Slavs generally. They are cheap, and they have 
the endurance of mules. They are far beneath the 
average for intelligence. Their manners are un- 
wholesome ; their personal habits are vile. Uncouth, 
uneducated, they overload the labour market in the 
anthracite district, and while there is good money 
when work is good, the production is in spurts, and 
there is many an idle week. 



COAL MINING. 219 

The second great American coalfield lies within 
the prairie plains of the Mississippi valley. The 
coal is exclusively bituminous, a good steam coal, 
but not much good for the purpose of cooking or gas- 
making. 

Here, I must say, the conditions of labour are 
better. By far the larger percentage of workers are 
of Anglo-Saxon race and English-speaking, and they 
have the best classes of work, and nearly all the 
machinery is in their hands. But the Hungarian has 
wandered into this district also, and, as he is a good 
worker and cheap, he is putting the higher-priced 
labourer at a disadvantage. 

The trade unions are captains of the situation. 
In Iowa employers and men meet once a year, and 
draw up a contract of wages for the next twelve 
months. Now and then big companies break loose 
and fight the unions, and win. But this does not 
affect wages. In the non-union mines the wages are 
the same as in the union mines. Mine owners make 
no distinction between union and non-union men. 

*' All we ask is that a man shall be a good 
worker," is their plea. There is, however, always 
trouble when the unions attempt to dictate what men 
the owners shall not employ. But I found that 
where the unions were strongest, where wages were 
high, the hours short, there the quality of the work 
and the quantity of coal turned out were decidedly be- 
low other districts where what is called " free labour " 
prevailed. On the other hand, I must say that in 
such States as Kansas and Missouri, where the big 
companies defy the unions, the conditions of work 



120 AMERICA AT WORK. 

are unsatisfactory, and the wild scamper of competi- 
tion makes pay bad and employment irregular. 

Eoughly it costs in the western coalfields about 
Bs. to produce a ton, for which the miner gets about 
26. lOd. It is calculated that coal sells at the pit 
mouth from 5d. to 7Jd. above the cost of operating. 
While the general conditions of mining labour in 
the States are inferior to those in Great Britain, 
largely, as I have shown, because of the passing 
away of any large need for expert pitmen by the 
wholesale introduction of machinery and the inflow 
of Hungarians, and while in intelligence and habits 
of life the British miner is, in American jargon, " out 
of sight " compared with the Pennsylvanian coal 
earner, I found among the coal owners and the 
managers — as, indeed, I found everywhere among 
heads of departments — far more business eagerness 
and faculty for swiftly re-arranging things to 
meet altered conditions than I have noticed among 
Englishmen of corresponding position. 

Business is not friendship. You are doing the 
American no injustice in saying he is unblushingly 
unscrupulous if it suits him. He resents the use of 
the word, I know, but I speak of him in comparison 
with employers I have met in other regions of the 
earth. He knows the other man is trying to outwit 
him, and the clever man, the man who wins applause, 
who is the commercial idol of modern America, is 
not always the man of integrity, but too often the 
man who outwits the most and has the biggest bag 
of dollars. 

But putting all sharp practices on one side, and 



COAL MINING. 221 

regarding the handling of coal from the point of 
energy, finding new outlets, adaptability to circum- 
stances, the American has a hundred things to teach 
the Briton. Coal is not an easily handled freight, 
and over long distances will be carried at the rate 
of one-sixteenth of a penny a ton per mile. A 
modern coal truck carries fifty tons. Indeed, coal 
from the Pennsylvanian fields has been delivered 
in Italy at 6s. 6d. a ton. 

A large output per man, low wages, up-to-date 
machinery, combinations of mine owners and rail- 
way owners and ship owners, together with the push 
and bustle which would reduce an Englishman to a 
wreck in a month, is laying the way for America to 
actively compete with Great Britain in the coal 
markets of the world. America has well passed us 
in the output, and, excepting in India, no coal in 
the world is produced at a lower cost. Striking 
averages, it costs 6s. 4Jd. to produce a ton of coal 
in the United Kingdom; in the United States it is 
4s. 5d. At present the United States consumes 
250,000,000 tons of coal, and Great Britain consumes 
about 175,000,000. The American coal output has 
doubled in twelve years. And so it will go on, the 
American getting the upper hand, unless British 
mine owners show more business adaptability, and 
our miners work harder. 

Yet the Americans are paying a big price for 
their success. I recall sitting among half-a-dozen 
men who were waiting to go into a pit. They were 
young fellows, most of them, but pale and worn, and 
with the tiredness of the long-worked on their fea- 



222 AMERICA AT WORK. 

tures. There was energy about them, but it was 
feverish; they drove at their work, for that was a 
necessary condition to earn a livelihood. But none 
of them would ever become old in years. 

A friend took me to the office of a coal magnate. 
He was very kind and friendly, but he was pale and 
pinched, and his eyes were the most wearied I have 
ever looked into. 

*' What's the matter? " was asked. 

** Oh," he said, with a sigh, '' I'm tired ; just tired ; 
just so tired I would like to crawl into a hole in the 
ground and shut it behind me." 

I made some remark about the fascination of 
controlling an enormous industry. He smiled. 

'' Yes," he said, *' I used to feel like that — when 
I was younger. Now it has gone. But the anxieties, 
the rush, the worries — they are more than ever. I 
cannot sleep at night because I have my business 
to think of. I wish I was a farmhand with just my 
work to do, and when it is done nothing more to 
bother about." He sat with his head leaning on the 
palm of his hand. " Yes. I'm just tired out. I wish 
I could go away for a rest," he said in reverie. 



CHAPTEE XIX. 

ELECTRICAL WORK. 

SOME day — far off, but not altogether visionary 
— it will be possible to go into a great engineer- 
ing shop which will be a maze of machinery, 
with huge cranes gliding and swinging overhead, 
and below black monsters of intricate tools. But 
with only one man in sight. 

He will sit before a little instrument not unlike 
a typewriter. There will be the click of a button, 
and one of the cranes will rumble along in obedience ; 
another click, and a stream of spluttering fire will 
flow into the nozzle of a casting ; another click, and 
another, and many clicks, and the metal will take 
shape and pass on to machines, cunning and wonder- 
ful, which will file here and affix there, and from the 
door of the far end of the engineering shop will pass 
out one of the marvels of the world, a dynamo with 
the power of the fabled genii, awful in its completed 
strength. 

This was the picture that formed itself in my 
mind's eye as I stood on the bridge overlooking the 
main aisle in the works of the Westinghouse Electric 
Company, lying in a dreary, bleached valley within 
a dozen miles of the smoke-shrouded town of Pitts- 
burg. 

There were more than six thousand people about 



224 AMERICA AT WORK. 

the plant, but from that point, with a quarter of a 
mile long shop stretching to haziness below me, it 
was as though I had dropped in when work was 
practically over, and only a sprinkling of men re- 
mained to tidy things up. Yet the place was in full 
swing of labour. Big machines were busy, biting a 
way through steel, carving delicately with chisel- 
tooth a perfect circle, carrying completed work, and 
depositing it on one side. There was something grand 
in the silent, Cyclopean strength of it all. 

I remarked on the absence of men. " Yes," I was 
told, " we pay men to look after the machines. But 
it is the machines that do the work." 

Two days I spent about these Westinghouse 
electric works. To me, more wonderful even than 
the wit of man which, with quaint devices, has cap- 
tured the mysterious, terrible power called elec- 
tricity, was the way the harness, as it were, was 
being fashioned by other machines. 

It was in the Westinghouse shops I realised, with- 
out the shadow of a doubt, that the old order of toil is 
absolutely passing away, that the great worker is 
the machine, and man only an overseer. And when 
I fully understood this, my mind skipped to the 
future, and I saw the man sitting at the typewriter- 
like appliance, and I heard the click-click-click, 
and every click meant that something was being 
done mechanically which formerly had taken dozens 
of men to accomplish. 

They speak of George Westinghouse in Pittsburg 
as " an old man." He is old only according to Ameri- 
can reckoning. He is fifty-five. Thirty years ago 



ELECTRICAL WORK. 225 

George Westinghouse was a " dirty mechanic " on 
a United States warship. To-day he is the head of 
twenty-five companies with an aggregate capital of 
£20,000,000, and employing more than twenty thou- 
sand people. 

He is the typical specimen of the American at 
work, a colossal man physically, a storehouse of 
energy, a man who doesn't know what rest is, and 
who has his Pittsburg house near the railway, and 
on the railway his special car so that he may work 
with his secretaries whilst he dashes to New York; 
a man who, when, he comes to England, is jokingly 
said to walk all the way, because, with only halts to 
eat and sleep, he tramps the decks up and down 
hour after hour. 

I talked with his managers, his men, even his 
office boys; and his character — his contempt for 
dawdling, and his bluff " let me see work " attitude 
— stirred enthusiasm in them. His men say he has 
the quickest eye for ability. Experience and age 
count nothing with him. What he wants is brains. 

" "Where did you start in the Westinghouse Com- 
pany ? " I asked a young fellow of twenty-seven 
earning £1,000 a year. 

*' At the very bottom — doing cleaner's work." 

" And what gave you your start to your present 
position? '* 

" One day Mr. Westinghouse said to me, ' Drop 
what you're doing, and just go wandering round the 
works and let me know where you think money can 
be saved.' That was all. One day I noticed a lot of 
copper filings in the sweepings. They were being 



226 AMERICA AT WORK. 

lost. If they were saved it would mean money. 
And within a fortnight I had found out how to save 
the firm $400 (£80) a month." 

Thirty years ago George Westinghouse started 
" making things." He invented the compressed air 
brake bearing his name. When you go from London 
to Edinburgh, look between the carriages and you 
will see the clamping of pipes. That is the Westing- 
house brake. Go to Central Siberia, and when the 
great trans-Asian train halts for long at a wayside 
station you will probably find that the engine-driver 
has applied the Westinghouse brake so vigorously 
that he cannot get it off again. 

When George Westinghouse started making air 
brakes he turned out two a day. Now his company 
turn out one a minute every minute in the twenty- 
four hours of the day. There are a million and a 
half of them used in the world. But it took him 
seven years to induce the European railways to 
adopt his invention. All the " mile long " freight 
trains in America (really not a third of a mile long, 
but that is the American way of putting it) have now 
the automatic brake. Europe again lags. The only 
Old World country that has fully adopted the West- 
inghouse brake for freight trains is Russia. A 
£400,000 order from the Russian Government was 
recently given to the Westinghouse Company to 
supply brakes for freight trains. 

There was a fortune in the Westinghouse brake. 
George Westinghouse, however, turned his mind to 
something else. He started making pneumatic rail- 
way switching and signalling apparatus. He 



ELECTRICAL WORK. 227 

applied electricity to the same thing, and in America 
he has revolutionised switching and signalling. 

As you ride out of American stations 3^ou pass 
signal boxes, but you see men pressing buttons and 
leaving it to electricity to do the rest. At the Union 
Terminus in Boston, it required 350 levers and fifty- 
one men to attend to the switch and signal work. 
Calculating twenty levers to each man, and the shifts 
eight hours each, the old mechanical contrivance 
needed seventeen men to a shift. Now only seven 
men altogether are employed, or two to a shift. 
Seven thousand pounds a year is saved at the Boston 
Station by the electric system. 

Another development. It is sixteen years since 
George Westinghouse decided to " play electricity 
for all it was worth." The Westinghouse Electric 
Company at East Pittsburg is the greatest plant in 
America, as the Westinghouse works at Old Traf- 
ford, near Manchester, is the greatest plant in 
England. 

East Pittsburg is to-day the mart for ideas in 
electrical work. And here is a point which shows 
the type of man who directs these businesses. There 
are thousands of inventions, good in theory, which 
won't bear practical work. Most manufacturers, 
being satisfied that an idea, however ingenious, is 
unpractical, would thank the inventor, and say good- 
day. Mr. Westinghouse, with the intuition of genius, 
often buys a patent that has been condemned. He has 
a body of men who do nothing but experiment. He 
takes an unworkable patent to a man. " The idea in 
this thing is all right, only it won't work in prac- 



228 AMERICA AT WORK. 

tice. I want you to put it right." And it has to be 
done. 

We all know the name of Nikola Tesla, who in 
the scientific world is regarded as an electrical 
visionary. Mr. Westinghouse cut through the 
flamboyant imaginativeness of Nikola Tesla and got 
down to the bed rock of his theories. He saw that 
Nikola Tesla, behind all his firework talk, had 
brains. Patents of Nikola Tesla, regarded by many 
men as waste paper, Mr. Westinghouse bought. He 
handed over the ideas to sound, level-headed elec- 
tricians with the order, " Make them practicable." 
It was from the scoffed- at Tesla that came the germ 
of the distinctive Westinghouse electrical apparatus 
in induction motors, and the use of alternating high- 
tension currents. 

George Westinghouse, like all Americans, is 
always enthusiastic about something. He took up 
the Nernst electric lamp, which was nothing but a 
laboratory device, and made it practicable. Natural 
gas was found accidentally on his works. He 
started making gas-engines. He has two in his 
power house, one of 750 horse-power. George West- 
inghouse is a believer in gas. He says that the 
economies which must result from the distribution 
of power b}^ means of gas generated at central points, 
and conveyed in pipes along the lines of railroad 
for the operation of engines and electric generators, 
would justify the expenditure of large capital 
necessary for such installation in connection with the 
electric equipment of railways, particularly on 
metropolitan and suburban lines. 




A HUGE GENERATOR FIELD 

AT THE WESTINGHOUSE WORKS. 



ELECTRICAL WORK. 229 

You see from this something of the energy, the 
tirelessness, of a typical American at work. 

The management of a great American business 
concern is carried to its finest point in those mam- 
moth shops at East Pittsburg. Take that great 
aisle. There was being built a generator forty-five 
feet high, intended for the New York Eapid Transit 
Company, a great wheel, sister of the Pyramids in 
size, and generating an electric current sufficient to 
drive 600 street cars. It was the biggest thing of the 
kind ever made. It'was being tested, and would then 
be sent in sections to New York. Of course, no rail- 
way track could carry it, no tunnel could let it pass 
through; so the sections were as big as possible, 
and miade within one and a quarter inches of a 
tunnel aperture. The whole floor was of steel, with 
thousands of bolt holes. There were the colossal 
cranes. They were not swinging work to the 
machines. The work was so big that in all cases the 
machines had to be swung to the work. Everything 
was driven electrically. Some of the " tools," as big 
as a cottage, were " self contained " — within the 
frame they carried a motor, and it simply needed 
the fixing of a button to set the thing working. 

I went among these " tools." They were all busy 
with an intelligence that made the layman wonder. 
Six or seven big " tools " were thundering and cut- 
ting, and not a man near. 

"Haven't you a man to look after these?" I 
asked. 

" Oh, yes," was the reply, " but I suppose he is 
busy just now doing something else." 



230 AMERICA AT WORK. 

Throughout the works were 1,750 machine tools, 
from delicate watch-maker's appliances, turning out. 
jewelled bearings for sensitive measuring instru- 
ments, to making the frame work of electric cars 
weighing fifty tons. 

At the first glance everything seems confusion. 
But look at the door at one end of the shop, and you 
see a rough, ungainly part being brought in. Look 
at the other, and you see finished machines being 
packed on railway trucks and despatched to their 
destination. The whole thing is clockwork. The 
scheme is one of dates. An order comes in to the 
main office. It is handed on to the twelve men in 
the production department. Every section of the 
works is informed of what is required, not simultane- 
ously, but at proportionate dates, sometimes six 
months from one to the other. Every day's work is 
arranged to a nicety, so that the men working in 
the middle of the shop won't get a pile of stuff ready, 
and block the way long before the appliances are 
wanted. 

The making of parts is specialised. Often a work- 
man doesn't know what he is really making. But he 
delivers on a certain day, and on that certain day 
another department is just ready to receive and 
advance the work another stage. Such an immensity 
of work is done that it takes fully six months for a 
motor to pass through all its stages in that quarter- 
of-a-mile-long shop. But each day from that one 
aisle there leave sixty 200 horse-power motors for 
street cars. 

Many were the shops I visited, the grimy foundry, 



ELECTRICAL WORK. 231 

and the brake works where the Westinghouse brakes 
were being turned out at the rate of one a minute. 
But I always found my way back to the electrical 
departments, for here there was something like 
wizardry in the machinery, making machinery more 
wonderful still. 

" The work of our designers is to simplify," I was 
told. " Electric appliances are not becoming more 
complex, but more simple." 

That explains largely why, of the 6,000 employees 
on this plant, 1,200 are girls. It explains also how 
a man who was a clerk six months ago is now work- 
ing in an electric shop ; how, when a man is dis- 
missed from watching a machine that punches holes, 
he is soon expert enough to look after a machine that 
cuts a groove. The standardisation of parts, and the 
devoting of years to making the same thing, have 
the effect of converting men into machines, and the 
machines into intelligent workers. 

Yet what room there is for brains ! A man who 
can devise an improvement in a machine which will 
reduce cost and produce more : he is the man worth 
anything. The American working man knows this. 
He has got rid of the old-fashioned idea that he is 
doing an ill-turn by displacing labour. He is doing 
a good turn for himself, and this is the thing that 
counts. An employer thinks little of a man who has 
no suggestions. The management are all eyes for 
the clever man or boy. There is no room for grum- 
bling that a man doesn't get a chance. If a man 
misses chances in America he lacks the brains. All 
this is understood. When an American working 



232 AMERICA AT WORK. 

man sees another do something ingenious he is posi- 
tive he can do it also. Anyway, he tries. If he fails 
he knows the reason. 

Specially did I inquire into the conditions of 
labour in the Westinghouse Electric Company. I 
saw that the secret of the enormous output was 
due to four things: standardisation, labour-saving 
machinery, good pay to good workers, enthusiasm of 
the men. There were many Englishmen employed. 
In regard to them it was the same story I had heard 
elsewhere. On their first coming they were slow\ 
They were jacks of all trades in electricity and 
masters of none. But when they dropped into Ameri- 
can ways of focussing all their energies on one thing 
they were able, not only to hold their own, but often 
to beat the American. 




A COLOSSAL WESTINGHOUSE 
ROTARY FIELD GENERATOR 



CHAPTEE XX. 

THE WOOLLEN INDUSTRY. 

IT was an American, and a professor at one of the 
big textile colleges, who spoke. Said he : " It is 
the high fence of a tariff that keeps English 
textiles out of the United States. If English goods 
were able to compete on even terms with American, 
half our woollen and cotton factories would be closed 
in a year. As it is, Heaven help the American textile 
manufacturers when you Englishmen take to using 
quick machinery." 

At Lowell, Massachusetts, I visited the Textile 
School, the best in all America, and had a long talk 
with Mr. William W. Crosby, the Principal, a charm- 
ing man, young, widely read and travelled, and with 
keenness in every line of his handsome face. He 
was enthusiastic about technical instruction, and 
especially about what it was doing for the textile 
trade, lifting America into the sky above European 
work. 

As we were leaving the school he assisted me 
with my overcoat. " Why," he exclaimed, " here's 
my coat, the same as yours, and made at the same 
place. I bought it last year when I was in London, 
and at half the price I would have to pay in America. 
As to quality, it has been the marvel of many of 
our manufacturers, for they cannot turn out stuff 
like that. Yes, and this suit of clothes I am wearing 



234 AMERICA AT WORK. 

was made in London also. I know a good piece of 
cloth when I see it, and I was simply astonished that 
I had to pay only £4 for the suit. Splendid goods, 
indeed! Why, here I couldn't get anything like 
that quality for twice the money." 

That almost accidental confession from the Prin- 
cipal of the Lowell Textile School was a striking 
commentary on the relative merits of English and 
American cloths. 

During the time I was in the States I often 
shuddered at tailoring prices, and thanked my lucky 
stars my wardrobe was sufficient to take me back to 
my own country. Nowhere did I see American tex- 
tiles that came within a long distance of English. 
When I did see excellent clothing, with a fit equal 
to Conduit Street, the material was English im- 
ported, and the price was from two and a half to 
three times that of London. 

It is a common remark that American working 
men are better dressed than the English workmen. 
If I may indulge in an exaggeration to demonstrate 
a truism, I would comment that American clothes 
won't last long enough to get shabby. 

Take the average crowd that shoulders you in 
Cheapside, and compare it with the crowd that 
hustles you in Broadway. The first swift impression 
is that the New Yorkers are far better dressed. That 
impression holds. Men coming from Pittsburg iron- 
works are certainly more sprucely clad than the 
cutlers of Sheffield. You cry " Yea, yea ! " to the con- 
stant assertion of Americans that they are better 
dressed than their English friends. One day, how* 



THE WOOLLEN INDUSTRY. 235 

ever, you meet an English gentleman. You notice 
a dignity, a refinement, a restraint of tone about 
him and his dress that the American never has. It 
is not the fit of his clothing, for the Americans are 
as able as English tailors, but it is the quality. 
From him you may commence to reason backwards. 
You will find the American business man, while he 
dresses neatly — though his fancy in shirts last year 
was on the lines of a Neapolitan ice — is wearing 
material such as you find in the cheapest English 
goods ; stuff the like of which in quality is hardly 
ever seen except upon a dummy at the doorway of 
a " ready made " shop. 

Large though American incomes may be, a man 
has to be within the circle of the wealthy to afford 
having a suit specially made, even of this stuff. It is 
marvellous to notice the number of well-to-do men 
who wear ready-made clothing. The fit, however, is 
far better than the fit of English ready-made clothing. 

A trained, and not a lay eye is necessary to 
identify a ready-made coat in America. That be- 
speaks ingenuity, adaptability, a huge stock of 
accommodating sizes. Besides, half-made clothes 
have a run in America. The goods are cut and 
tacked, as one's clothes are in England at the last 
fitting-on by the tailor, and but few alterations are 
necessary to make the coat look as though it has 
been specially made. 

There are, however, several reasons why Ameri- 
can textiles are poorer than our own. There is the 
tariff. When the tariff was cut down a number of 
years ago the American woollen manufacturer found 



236 AMERICA AT WORK. 

himself hard hit by the fine and cheap goods sent 
from Yorkshire. He met the competition in two 
ways — first by producing a better article than he 
had ever done before, and by clamouring for a 
reimposition of the heavy duty. His clamours 
succeeded. Up went the tariff fence again, shutting 
out English wares, and down, with a rush, came 
the quality of American goods. 

Another reason is that the ordinary American is 
more anxious than the ordinary Englishman to have 
clothes that look smart rather than wear well. Also 
he wants them cheap — from the American idea of 
cheapness. A British working man gets a service- 
able suit, and it may be two or three years before he 
discards it. In its latter days it will be dirty, greasy, 
baggy-kneed, and frayed. The American working 
man never wears a suit till it gets in that condition. 
He has something neat, well-fitting, and of latest 
cut. It may only be poor shoddy. In three or four 
months, when it begins to go to pieces, he has got 
tired of the suit. 

And just as an American hardly ever has his 
boots repaired, but throws them away and buys a 
new pair, so he has three or four suits of clothes to 
the one suit that the Englishman has. American 
clothing would not last long enough to get into the 
state of grime a British workman's clothes are 
often in. 

In writing this down, I am not overlooking the 
fact that, man for man, the American is much more 
solicitous about the smartness of his appearance than 
is his compeer on this side of the Atlantic. There- 



THE WOOLLEN INDUSTRY. 237 

fore the second reason why American woollen goods 
are inferior is that the American would rather have 
something that looked good than was really good. 

The manager of one of the biggest works in New 
England said to me: " Of course we've got nothing 
like your English stuff," and then dropping into a 
simile, he added: "As long as we are making for- 
tunes, turning out wheelbarrows which people want 
because they are cheap, why should we spend time 
turning out fine equipages which are dear, and which 
people don't want? " 

Then he ventured upon an assumption which was 
hardly warranted. He implied that, if they wanted 
to, the woollen manufacturers of New England could 
turn out as excellent cloth as we have in Great 
Britain. Certainly, when the heavy tariff was re- 
moved, they gave evidence of turning out far better 
stuff than they do now. But he failed to reckon two 
important factors. 

Frequently have I referred to the stimulating 
atmosphere of America, that braces one, pumps the 
ozone of energy into one's veins, exhilarates, and 
spurs one on. But this atmosphere is not suitable 
for woollen manufacture. The muggish air which 
hangs about Yorkshire dales plays a very important 
part in the fine qu.ality of woollen goods. There the 
English weaver has an advantage which the Ameri- 
can can never have. 

Another thing is that among the workpeople in 
New England, which is Old America, society is more 
settled. The habit in the west, of being a cow- 
puncher one year, a saloon-keeper the next, an in- 



238 AMERICA AT WORK. 

surance agent the next, a parson the year after, then 
a farmer, then a speculator in mines, does not exist. 
People are more inclined to keep to the industry they 
have once embarked upon. 

But sentiment, tradition, environment, count for 
much in commercial work. And in the woollen 
business this exists to a small extent in Massachu- 
setts, Ehode Island, and the adjoining States. 
In the Yorkshire woollen areas it is possible to 
trace back two or three generations, and perhaps 
more, of families who have done nothing but weave 
wool. Many American manufacturers told me they 
reckoned this a great advantage to the British trader. 
Young people grew up in the atmosphere of wool- 
weaving, and almost by. second nature they knew 
things which the best equipped textile college could 
not impart. Comparatively few of the workers in 
the New England woollen mills are American born. 
The mass are French-Canadian and Irish — good 
enough workpeople, in a restricted sense, but lacking 
the intuitive knowledge of our Yorkshire weavers. 

The best workmen are imported English people, 
and the best machinery is that which comes from 
England. In places are whole colonies of trans- 
planted English folk, and in some mills I went past 
rows of machines bearing the plates of Yorkshire and 
Lancashire firms. In works that turned out goods 
of the cheap and shoddy quality quick American 
machines were used. In the works that produced a 
fairly good article slower English machines were to 
be seen. I am not far from the mark in saying 
that the quicker the machine, and the greater the 



THE WOOLLEN INDUSTRY. 239 

quantity, the quality decreased in almost exact pro- 
portion. 

To nie, a Briton, with, I suppose, some few in- 
born British prejudices, in considering the industrial 
conditions of America, trying to be absolutely fair, 
appreciating what was better in England, having 
my little iling at what was worse and unwholesome, 
it came almost as a breath of relief to pass from 
trades and businesses that had management superior 
to our own, to the centre of the American textile 
world, and find that here at least England could still 
stand with chin high poised. 

America is truly the land of contrasts. These 
contrasts are a constant stumbling block to the man 
who would like to generalise on differences between 
the United States and England in single phrases. 
Take the matter of specialising, which Americans 
rightly declare is one of the reasons of their industrial 
prosperity. They are apt to scoff at the British manu- 
facturer, saying that he does not succeed so well be- 
cause he tries to do the whole business under one 
roof, instead of centring all his energy on a special- 
ity. That is true, and I fancy the American cannot 
have better proof than in the woollen factories of 
New England. 

In Yorkshire the preparation of yarns, carding, 
or dyeing is often quite a separate industry from 
that of weaving. In the Massachusetts mills the 
practice is for each firm to do everything from the 
time the greasy wool is delivered to its despatch 
as finished cloth. Therefore, I am tempted to say 
that one cause of the Yorkshire woollen manufac- 



240 AMERICA AT WORK. 

turer being prosperous is that he runs his works 
rather on the American line — though the system 
existed long before America put forth its strength 
as an industrial nation — whilst the Massachusetts 
manufacturer runs his works on the general English 
plan by not specialising. 

This led me to make investigations which were 
interesting in their results. Just as the English 
manufacturer in the mass suffers from competition 
because he does not specialise, so the Massachusetts 
woollen manufacturer who does not specialise either 
stands on a low level or makes comparatively slow 
progress. 

The method of the American woollen mills is an 
anomaly in America; it is an anachronism; it is 
altogether contrary to the way that nine Americans 
out of ten will declare is necessary for success. 

Here, then, I found a trade, not managed in the 
way it is managed in England, but managed in the 
way most other English trades are managed in 
England. I wrote to Washington, and an obliging 
Government official sent me a bulletin of facts 
and figures. When I dived into them I discovered 
that during the last twenty years the number of 
establishments engaged in wool manufacture had 
decreased over 13 per cent. This, however, was 
accounted for by the consolidation of businesses, 
because the invested capital had increased over 100 
per cent. Wages had increased enormously — but in 
striking an average the salaries and incomes of pro- 
prietors and firm members were reckoned — while the 
employment of men had increased 34 per cent., and 



THE WOOLLEN INDUSTRY. 241 

Aiany of these were boys of seventeen, eighteen, 
and twenty ; women had increased 69 per cent., whilst 
the employment of children under sixteen years of 
age had within the last ten years increased 37 per 
cent. 

That looked fairly reassuring from the American 
point of view, till I turned to the table giving 
statistics of the making of woollen goods. Here I 
found that in the decade between 1890 and 1900, not 
only had the establishments decreased 21 per cent, 
(they decreased 34 per cent, in the previous decade), 
but the capital invested had decreased 5 per cent., 
the number of salaried officials had decreased 7 per 
cent., the salaries themselves had slumped 25 per 
cent., wage earners had decreased 10 per cent., and 
there was a steady decrease of men, women, and 
children. Their wages had gone down, in the case 
of men 0.9 per cent., women 13 per cent., and children 
11 per cent. The number of looms, the value of pro- 
ducts, showed a falling away of over 10 per cent. 
The only increase was in the number of spindles, 
from 1,815,380 to 1,906,581— a move upwards of 5 
per cent. 

The official explanation of this falling off is that 
the introduction of worsted cloth for men's wear, and 
the development of knit goods manufacture have 
made inroads on the consumption of carded wool 
goods, which formerly were necessities. The real 
explanation why the quantity of wool used in the 
American mills is 10 per cent, less now than ten years 
ago, despite the vast increase of population, is that 
the customer will have a cheap and showy article, 

Q 



242 AMERICA AT WORK. 

and this can be turned out with worsted, flannel, and 
shoddy. Indeed, there are 105 mills in America that 
turn out nothing but shoddy. An attempt is being 
made to push a Bill through Congress making all 
manufacturers of and dealers in shoddy goods pay 
a heavy tax, and tag their goods, stating their 
nature. The wool growers are enthusiastic ; the cloth 
manufacturers are contemptuous and wrathful. The 
wholesale use of shoddy in America made of any- 
thing from tattered carpets to seaweed, the willing- 
ness of the public to wear such material so long as 
it looks nice for a month or two, has hit hard the 
genuine woollen business. The machinery in many 
mills is only in partial operation or run on part 
time. 

Though there is not that helter-skelter, nerve- 
racking kind of life in the eastern that there is in 
the western States, the employers I found were all 
awake to the necessities of modern trade. In one 
way they provided a parallel to English manufac- 
turers, for theirs is one of the oldest industries in 
America, and while admitting the pace and the dar- 
ing was not so great as in other businesses, they 
pleaded custom, long usage, difliculty in making a 
break from the habits of a century — precisely the 
excuses the English manufacturer gives when face 
to face with American competition, and he is in- 
vited to get himself and his works into line with 
ways across the Atlantic. 

What the American does is to keep his eye on 
improved machinery, and work the machinery and 
men to their utmost. While ten years ago only a 



THE WOOLLEN INDUSTRY. 243 

few broad woollen looms were operated up to 100 
picks per minute, now they run at from 115 to 120, 
and in some cases 150 picks per minute. 

There is no " ca' canny " among the workpeople. 
There are practically no Huddersfield difficulties of 
men only looking after a loom or two while several 
miles away other men are able to look after half as 
many again. The Huddersfield man is an admir- 
able workman, but if he went to Massachusetts and 
started talking about custom, and only wanting to 
do about half as much work as men round about 
him were doing, he would be told many things for 
his good, and his ears would tingle for a fortnight. 
But when Huddersfield men go to Massachusetts, 
and after a few grimaces throw away their Hudders- 
field arguments and adapt themselves to their new 
situations, not only are they as good men as the 
Americans, the French-Canadians, and the Irish, 
but far better, and with a smile look after twice as 
many looms as their " local custom " allowed them 
to attend to in the old country. 

America has practically no export trade in 
woollen goods. Her mills supply only the home 
market, and any foreign competition is wellnigh 
killed by high tariffs. Beyond the United States, 
where the wool stuffs would be tested alongside those 
of England, America has no chance at ail. 

In regard to the conditions of labour, I found 
that the working week was generally 60 hours. 
The wages of a man who looks after eight looms 
is about 45s. Women make from 20s. to 25s. Chil- 
dren, youngsters between the ages of fourteen and 



244 AMERICA AT WORK. 

sixteen, make about 12s. Rent is high, and clothes 
are dear. Food, however, is about the same price 
in both countries. The New England mill operative 
*' does himself well." He feeds well — better than the 
Yorkshire operative. He has, however, no eye on a 
coming rainy day. It doesn't enter his mind that 
he may fall sick or ever get out of work. He doesn't 
save money. 

On the whole the English manufacturer is more 
prosperous than the American, whilst the American 
mill hand works harder and longer, and gets more 
wages. Balancing one thing with another, however, 
the operatives of the two countries are, in material 
condition, very much on a level, though a trifling 
advantage is on the side of the American. 

The American mill operative. Englishman, Irish- 
man, French-Canadian, or American, struck me as a 
clear-headed, far-seeing fellow. He has no prejudice 
against labour-saving machinery. He doesn't regard 
the boss as his natural enemy. 

Summing up my impressions of the woollen in- 
dustry, I would say that though America has much 
to teach us, it is not yet necessary to send York- 
shire mill owners nor operatives to Massachusetts to 
learn their business. We amble behind our Yankee 
friends in many trades. In the woollen business, 
however, it is they who do the following. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

THE COTTON INDUSTRY. 

1A ALL RIVER is the centre of the American cotton 
7 industry. It is as like a Lancashire manufac- 
turing town transplanted as you can well con- 
ceive. My first acquaintance with it was on a 
grey, sodden morning. The streets were no wider 
than those of Oldham ; there was a depressing dingi- 
ness about the main thoroughfare ; groups of idlers, 
hands in pockets, hung about the street corners — not 
a usual sight in America. Up side-streets could 
be caught glimpses of huge, stone-built mills, and 
occasionally there would strike the ear the roll of 
multitudinous machinery. 

There are 41 companies, owning 87 cotton mills, in 
the town, with 3,000,000 spindles, over 75,000 looms, 
with close upon 30,000 workpeople, who draw over 
$240,000 a week in wages for turning out 250,000 
pieces a week, or 865,900,000 yards of cloth a year. 
The total horse-power is 88,048, but only 1,148 of 
this is got from the ten water-wheels on the banks 
of a little stream. Fall River, which gives its name 
to the town. The capital stock in the mills is touch- 
ing £5,000,000. 

Though Fall River is on American soil, and has 
more than one-seventh of all the spindles in the 



246 AMERICA AT WORK. 

United States, it cannot fairly be called an Ameri- 
can town. The population is 105,000, but out of 
that number only 15,000 are American-born. There 
are just as many English people; there are 23,000 
Irish, 30,000 French-Canadians, 5,000 Portuguese, 
and about 10,000 Italians, Poles, Swedes, Eussians, 
and Armenians. 

I went into one huge spinning room where the 
foremen were all Irish, and all the women workers 
French-Canadian or Italian. I saw notices to the 
workpeople printed in four languages. 

The town is less than fifty miles from Boston, 
which is a great dumping ground for immigrants, 
and as labour is in heavy demand throughout 
Massachusetts, these people get work almost at once. 
The scarcity of labour puts up its value. They 
secure good wages, though the work they give in 
return is by no means good. Yet high though the 
wages are — that is, comparatively high with what 
such labour would be worth in the old countries — 
they are really 20 per cent, less than they were a 
generation ago, when American working people were 
chiefly employed. Cheap foreign labour knocked out 
the born Americans. 

A great mass of the labour is of the shifting 
sort. A man goes into a cotton mill not by any 
means because he is a cotton spinner, but to earn 
money. Next 3^ear he may be a steward on one of 
the huge palaces of river boats, or be doing a thriv- 
ing business as a patent medicine vendor. Each 
week every mill loses from 5 to 10 per cent, of its 
workpeople, principally because they are turning 



THE COTTON INDUSTRY. 247 

their hands to something else, and raw material 
in the shape of ignorant Hungarians or French- 
Canadians has to be brought in to take their place. 
Manufacturers complained to me that they are 
severely handicapped alongside the Lancashire 
manufacturers, because their workpeople have not 
the atmosphere of the mill about them. 

Here, then, in the cotton as in the woollen in- 
dustry, I saw that one reason why the American pro- 
duct was inferior to the English was because of the 
absence of heredity, if I may use the word, of those 
people whose fathers and grandfathers were spinners 
and weavers, and who have known something about 
cotton ever since they have known anything. 

Americans are at the heads of the mills, but 
what struck me forcibly is that the tremendous per- 
centage of the men who are skilled, who are doing 
the work requiring skilled labour, are Englishmen; 
The principal instructors at the Textile School at 
Lowell — an institution doing splendid work, and 
which filled me with admiration — are Englishmen. 
The finest machinery, despite the heavy, almost pro- 
hibitive tariff, is English. I visited the Fall River 
Ironworks: — the biggest of all the Fall River mills, 
and formerly an ironworks. I saw much English 
machinery. There were 266,512 ring spindles, and 
7,660 looms, and the number of employees is 2,700. 
I found Mr. Hathaway, the superintendent, in a 
block of new buildings overlooking the erecting of 
a fresh plant of 25,000 spindles and some 2,500 
looms. The mass of new machinery being unpacked 
was from Lancashire. Mr. Hathaway was using 



248 AMERICA AT WORK. 

vigorous language at the time it took his men to 
clean out the sawdust that clogged our grease- 
smeared machinery, as from cases it was arranged 
on the floor of the building. He is a man of decided 
opinions, and later on I heard him use much more 
vigorous language about the rusty machinery being 
delivered by an American firm. 

" You believe in English machinery/' I re- 
marked, after he had sung various praises. 

" Well," he replied concisely, " I don't know that 
I believe in English machines; but I believe in 
the best I can get hold of, and these come from 
England." 

He was very proud of the Fall River Ironworks, 
was Mr. Hathaway, who is a youngish man. That 
is, it will be some years yet before he is forty. And 
he is one of the extremely rare cases of a man suc- 
ceeding his father as a salaried official in the control 
of the same concern. He receives £6,000 a year as 
manager. 

I was interested in Mr. Hathaway because he 
seemed such a contradiction. Physically he is the 
antithesis of a hustler — short, broad built, inclined 
to stoop, rather lymphatic, and altogether unlike the 
typical Yankee. But during the afternoon we spent 
together whilst he was showing me over the iron- 
works, in which time he must have chewed up six 
cigars — not smoking them, but biting them in half 
and then munching them — I saw the working of an 
extremely alert and far-seeing mind. He was un- 
effusive, even slow in speech, but his thoughts were 
all of the Napoleonic order. He took me to the print 



THE COTTON INDUSTRY. 249 

works, where he said that the cloth printed each year 
was enough to wrap round the world three times. 

" How much stuff is woven a year at your 
mills? " I inquired. 

The answer was " 120,000,000 yards, which is 
23 miles an hour, or about as fast as the Oceanic 
travels across the Atlantic." 

The cotton manufacturer of the States has juet 
as lively an appreciation as any of his countrymen 
of the advantages of machinery. He, like the rest, 
has his eye fixed on the abolition of skilled, and, 
therefore, expensive labour, and getting level in the 
race for trade with Europe — where labour is cheap ^ 
and where American-grown cotton is delivered in 
Manchester at a less transit rate than it is in Pall 
River itself — by using the latest of labour-saving 
machinery, needing only an unskilled and there- 
fore a comparatively cheap labourer to do all the 
looking after. He doesn't care a brass farthing 
where the inventions hail from. He will have them 
if they mean a saving in the cost of production. 

And here, again, though the American is inclined 
to boast of his inventive faculty, the credit is really 
due to his unprejudiced adaptability. It is a strik- 
ing fact that a tremendous percentage of names to 
be read in the list of inventors at the Patent Office 
at Washington have a distinctly British smack about 
them, and that in the cotton and woollen industries, 
just as in engineering, there is a great number oi 
out-and-out British patents, not used, not even ade- 
quately tested in England, but tested, adapted, and 
improved in American workshops. 
Q* 



250 AMERICA AT WORK. 

Americans, as I show in my chapter dealing with 
the Westinghouse Electrical Company, will take an 
idea, good in theory but bad in practice, and work 
at the thing until it is really useful commercially. 
The British manufacturer, I am sadly afraid — 
though the disposition is passing, and must, I hope, 
pass absolutely — has a curious, almost inexplicable 
contempt for all new-fangled notions. Even when he 
gives them a trial it is hesitatingly, and one eye 
at least is kept very wide open for all mishaps and in- 
efficiencies. He is rather pleased with himself when, 
with " I thought so " and a complacent smile, he 
can pooh-pooh the thing as useless. The American's 
attitude is "Gee-whish! that thing is more bother 
than it's worth ; but the idea is all right, and I guess 
I'll put a man on to it who will find out what is 
wrong and put it straight." 

There is the Northrop loom, invented by James 
Northrop, of Keighley. If half a dozen mills use 
them in Lancashire it is an outside number. There 
are thousands of them in America, and the Draper 
Company, of Hopedale, Massachusetts, who now own 
the patents, are improving the machine every week. 
I did not see it in the Ironworks Mills. Mr. Hatha- 
way spoke most unfavourably of it, saying the looms 
were still in the experimental stage; that though 
they saved much labour, they required a great deal 
more looking after than the ordinary loom, and were 
constantly breaking down, so that on the matter of 
money-saving it was rather broader than it was long. 

This was said to me in the presence of the 
manager of another Fall Eiver mill, who burst out 



THE COTTON INDUSTRY. 251 

into surprise at the criticism, said he had used the 
Northrop looms for two years without the slightest 
hitch, and then marched me off to see this famous 
loom at work, about which there is as much con- 
troversy among cotton manufacturers as there was 
among ordinary folk in England about the Educa- 
tion Bill. 

In a great long room, whirling with machinery, 
and with only a few girls, and, I think, one man 
about, I saw a bunch of these automatic looms. I 
have visited some of the great Lancashire mills, and 
have been filled with amazement, as a mere layman, 
not so much at the machinery, but at the marvel- 
lous minds that evolved such perfection. But in 
Lancashire I never saw the Northrop loom, and to 
me (again as a layman) it was the very excellence 
of ingenuity. 

See what it does! It automatically feeds the 
shuttle with bobbins, and when a single warp breaks 
there is no bad weaving, for the machine comes to 
an instant stop. 

You know what a revolver magazine is like? 
Well, on one side the Northrop automatic loom is a 
similar magazine charged with about thirty bobbins, 
which will supply the shuttle for between two and 
three hours. Watch an empty shuttle as it is being 
flung from side to side! Just at its last yard it is be- 
neath the magazine. You hear the click as of a wooden 
trigger, and though your eye be not quick enough to 
follow the operation, you do notice that the empty 
bobbin has been knocked out of the shuttle, and 
tumbles into a box where lie others of its exhausted 



2.32 AMERICA AT WORK. 

mates, that a full-charged bobbin has been threaded 
and is clattering away without the apparent halt of 
a second. There is no worker necessary to watch 
for the emptying of the bobbin. 

In ordinary looms a very sharp eye must be kept 
for the breaking of any warps, to mend them, and so 
stop a stretch of defective weaving. In the Northrop 
loom each warp is threaded through a little brass 
key. When a warp breaks that key is released and 
drops, automatically stopping the machine. So a 
trained eye is not necessary to look out for a snapped 
warp. The tender of the machines has his or her 
attention called to the fact by the machine stopping. 

What is the consequence? A good weaver can 
look after twenty looms, whilst a fairly inexperienced 
hand can look after twelve. But these weavers have 
less outside work, as it were, than the Lancashire 
weaver. The labour is sub-divided. A weaver does 
nothing but weave. Other people do the cleaning 
and oiling ; boys bring the weft and take away the 
cloth. 

Lancashire manufacturers declare the Northrop 
is constantly breaking the warp, and the delay con- 
sequent is bothersome and expensive. The reason 
there is not so much breaking in America is that the 
warp is usually of coarser and stronger yarn than 
that used in England, and because the automatic 
looms are run slower than the ordinary looms. 

That the automatic loom, however, delicate as 
it may be at present, has come to stay in the States 
there can be no doubt. The principle of the thing 
is recognised as being invaluable in saving the cost 



THE COTTON INDUSTRY. 253 

of labour; that is what the manufacturer is after, 
and always after. 

As the English manufacturer is a little too con- 
servative, I am fain to think the American manu- 
facturer is a little too fond of change for newness' 
sake. But that is a tendency of the right sort, for it 
shows open-mindedness and daring. 

Let me give one instance which will show the 
spirit with which things are done in America. The 
trend is all towards the complete adoption of auto- 
matic looms. Now in England, if a Lancashire 
manufacturer who had a fine set of ordinary looms 
became converted to the use of the automatic, he 
would sell the old looms to some smaller manufac- 
turer glad to get good machinery second-hand. The 
same thing is often done in America. But the makers 
of automatic looms know that this retards, for some 
years at least, the second firm going to the expense 
of getting automatic machinery. What is done by 
one big firm who make automatic looms when it gets 
an order ? It takes the ordinary looms, which may 
be quite good, as part payment for the new. It 
doesn't sell them; it just smashes them into useless- 
ness. That is, on the face of it, the throwing away 
of thousands of pounds. It is a thing, I fancy, no 
Englishman would have the courage to do. But look 
at the long-sightedness! It is putting out of the 
market a huge quantity of looms, and so, partly by 
inducement, partly by compulsion, forcing on the 
time when all manufacturers will take to automatic 
machinery. Then will be the time when the huge 
harvest will be reaped. 



264 AMERICA AT WORK. 

Two things not to be lost sight of, however, in 
comparing Massachusetts with Lancashire, are that 
the looms are generally narrower in America than 
with us, and that the quality of the material, gener- 
ally speaking, is inferior to the English, though in 
the matter of appearance, fancifulness, taste in de- 
sign — usually copied or adapted from the French, 
not infrequently with incongruous effects which 
cause the artistic purist to squirm — the American 
has the best of it. Another thing which would make 
a Lancashire manufacturer grey-haired is the 
amount of waste permitted. In English mills the 
manufacturer sees some of his profit in keeping the 
amount of waste down to the minimum. At Lowell 
I mentioned this to a manufacturer, and his reply 
was characteristic : *' Of course, there is waste, a tre- 
mendous amount, but we find by experience it costs 
more to save the waste than it is worth. We let our 
machines rip along; we get more than a return in 
turning out cloth as fast as we can, and having all 
the weavers' energies f ocussed on that, than we would 
if time were occupied in saving the waste." 

Experienced and skilled men cannot, of course, 
be dispensed with, and that is why the best workmen 
to be found in the American cotton mills are Lancas- 
trians. The Massachusetts manufacturers, however, 
are by no means fond of them. They take with them 
to the States English trade union notions, and when- 
ever there is trouble in the way of a strike, there is 
usually an Englishman at the bottom of it all. 
English manufacturers are now more or less recon- 
ciled to trade unions. The American cotton manu- 



THE COTTON INDUSTRY. 255 

facturers abominate them. They anathematise talk 
about conditions of labour, hours of work, and 
quantity of work to be done. The idea is a free field, 
hard work, and any price for labour that fits the 
market. Therefore on the whole the American cotton 
manufacturers rather prefer the Irish and French- 
Canadians and Italians and Hungarians, unskilled 
labourers, who have, as yet, not the ability to organ- 
ise themselves. 

The American weaver, who does absolutely 
nothing but weave on machines that run rather 
slower than in England, is able to look after twice 
as many looms as the weaver does in Lancashire. 
Indeed, on an average, the looms the American 
looks after run about 20 per cent, slower than do 
those the Lancastrian looks after. 

When in Boston I had a long talk with Mr. North, 
the secretary of the Cotton Manufacturers' Associa- 
tion, and he provided me with an interesting series 
of figures in regard to wages. I found that the 
average weekly wage of the Massachusetts weaver is 
about 45s., whilst the average of the women workers 
is about 24s., which is exceedingly good compared 
with the average wages in Lancashire. Boys and 
girls from sixteen to eighteen get anything from 12s. 
to 20s. per week. The hours of labour are much the 
same as in England. 

Of recent years the New England manufacturer 
has been hard hit by the great cotton industry — 
due to the introduction of Northern capital — which 
has sprung up in the South, in Georgia, and in North 
and South Carolina. There labour is cheap. Men 



256 AMERICA AT WORK. 

only get about 23s. a week, and the women about 
16s., and young women 10s. for a week of sixty-six 
or seventy hours. In some places there are no 
regulations as to the age of child workers, and little 
ones of ten or even eight years of age are to be 
found by the hundred in the Southern mills working 
these long hours for 4s. or 5s. a week. Child labour 
is one of the blackest spots in American industrial 
life. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 

IN the preceding chapters I have dealt only with a 
few particular industries, and a few special 
phases of commercial life. There are many other 
methods and points of view with which I might have 
dealt, but these would only be a corroboration of what 
I have already indicated is the general trend of work 
in America. At one time I was tempted to include in 
this book a chapter on child labour in the United 
States, a subject on which I gathered a mass of data, 
and which shows that in some parts of the States 
there is more talk about humanity than the practice 
of it. I have refrained from doing so because it 
would be rather beyond the scope of my book, which 
is to deal with broad issues, and to point out the 
reasons why the American is beating so severe a 
competitor as Great Britain. 

Here and there in the preceding chapters I have 
allowed to peep out the fact that many things in the 
United States grated on my nerves. These, how- 
ever, were personal, and in this, the concluding 
chapter, I wish to sum up exactly how a careful 
study of conditions in the two lands has impressed 
me. 

The first conclusion I come to is that, whether 
they like it or not, the British people must become 



258 AMERICA AT WORK. 

reconciled to the fact that the position, so long held 
in the world, of Great Britain being the first com- 
mercial nation, must be transferred to the United 
States, and this largely because America has enor- 
mous and increasing natural resources with which 
we cannot possibly vie. 

The raw material from which America produces 
its workers is, I take it, the finest procurable in the 
world. America is not the dumping ground of the 
world's refuse. The immigrants into America 
are hardy Europeans discontented with the condi- 
tions in the old countries, but who have saved enough 
to set out and try their abilities in the new. Daring, 
pluck, and enterprise are necessary to break with 
family ties, and the men who have shown sufficient 
courage to do this are the very men likely to prosper 
wherever they settle. 

These people have mixed in marriage. The race 
produced is mongrel — I use the word in no offensive 
sense — and the keen, sprightly intelligence of mixed 
breeding is displayed in their character. There is 
no restraint under tradition, but there is the healthy 
feeling that every man's destiny is in his own hands. 

America lags behind the rest of the world in 
scientific attainment, in serious studies, in the pro- 
duction of work remarkable for its excellence rather 
than its quantity. But in energy, in whirl, in de- 
sire to do things passable and quickly, to turn out 
articles by the million, serviceable for a sufficient 
time at any rate, the workers of the United States 
stand at the head of mankind. The whole progress in 
America has been that of machinery, whilst prac- 



SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 259 

tically no progress has been made, compared with 
the rest of the world, in science. That, however, is 
another issue rather beyond the bounds of work and 
commerce. 

In one way the United States is from a genera- 
tion to half a century behind Great Britain. Let me 
explain. It is from thirty to fifty years since Great 
Britain rose to the crest of the wave of industrial 
prosperity. The country was dotted with great 
works, many of them built up by men who had risen 
from the ranks. They had laboured in mills and in 
ironworks themselves, and by great perseverance 
reared up businesses with world wide reputations. 

These men became kings in commerce because 
they brought to it the strength and the virility of 
the common people from which most of them sprung. 
These great firms exist to-day. But the heads of 
them are the sons or the grandsons of the founders — 
men who have never had the necessity of putting 
forward all the mental and physical energies neces- 
sary to raise a great concern to prosperity. 

It is doing the majority of them no injustice to 
say that if they had not inherited the business it is 
unlikely they would hold the positions in the indus- 
trial world they do to-day. Nature soon exhausts her- 
self, and one of the reasons why Great Britain is not 
showing the energy, the adaptability, the strenuous- 
ness of former days, is that the chiefs of trade in 
many cases are not really the men fitted by nature 
to occupy these positions. 

It is only to be expected that a man coming into 
the inheritance of a large business, and finding and 



260 AMERICA AT WORK. 

appreciating the social advantages of wealth — hav- 
ing a culture which his sire never attained, and devel- 
oping artistic and literary hobbies, showing a fond- 
ness for politics, for hunting, for travelling, for golf, 
for a hundred things, indeed, to which the founder of 
the firm never gave a second thought — should lack 
the concentration requisite to make the business 
increasingly prosperous. There are many exceptions 
to all this, but the theory I have laid down will 
be generally admitted by everybody who looks 
thoughtfully round the circle of their manufacturer 
acquaintances. 

In America the industrial community are prac- 
tically still of the first generation. One of the strik- 
ing things which impressed me in the course of my 
investigations was how many of the great firms were 
founded by men who are still in the heyday of their 
energy. They are very much in the position of the 
founders of great British firms half a century or so 
ago — men who have risen from the common stock, 
men with brains, possibly ungrammatical in their 
speech, resentful, maybe, towards those who talk 
about culture and refinement, and who affect the 
manners of what is called Society, but men who 
direct every ounce of intelligence they have in them 
towards further building up and developing their 
works. 

It is because our manufacturers are mostly of 
the second generation and have never had the great 
impetus of necessity to compel them to carve out 
their own futures, that they do not reveal that adroit- 
ness of mind, that alertness in realising possibilities, 



SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 261 

and that stirring vigour to carry out ideas, that they 
compare not very favourably with the American 
manufacturer, who is virgin soil, as it were, who is 
nothing if not daring, who cares not two straws for 
social distinction, whose only thoughts are for busi- 
ness and money-making, who is eager for everything 
new, and willing to adapt anything to the necessities 
of the age. The fact that he is not so charming a man 
to meet at the dinner table as the British manufac- 
turer is entirely beside the point we are discussing. 
Pursuing what I have already written about the 
first and second generations of manufacturers, let 
me say that when I had opportunity of inquiring 
into the capabilities of " second generations " in 
America I was amazed at the deterioration. I know 
that the tendency among many young men of the 
LTnited States is to go out and rear a fortune for 
themselves. There are nevertheless many businesses 
long enough in existence for sons to inherit part of 
the control, and in regard to a number of such cases 
I inquired into it was lamentable to hear men talk 
about what poor sticks the sons were compared with 
their fathers. So exactly the same procedure which 
has been going on for half a century in Great Britain 
is beginning in America. 

One of the things which accounts for much suc- 
cess in America is the atmosphere. There is some- 
thing in the atmosphere of America which keeps 
nerves braced up to continuous work. The air is 
so dry, clear, and invigorating that the Briton, most 
sluggishly inclined, feels the difference when he 



262 AMERICA AT WORK. 

lands in New York. He is a healthier man than 
at home ; he can walk further, and work longer and 
quicker. After lunch, in America, instead of men 
dawdling half an hour awa}^, the chief wish is to 
get back and be doing something. 

Incentive to industrial evolution is the result of 
being placed in difficult circumstances. Great 
Britain has lagged for a decade because she had 
little commercial rivalry and could do as she liked. 
America has advanced because she has had to fight 
a hard battle, a battle for industrial existence, and 
the intensity of strife has brought her out on top. 
She has milked the world for ideas, appropriated 
anything and everything in the way of invention to 
her own service, and has good reason — though at 
times she trumpets it a little too blatantly — to be 
proud of her achievements. 

While Great Britain cannot hope to rival the 
United States in resources, that is no reason why our 
manufacturers should not get into lin6 with modern 
commercial and industrial methods. Nine-tenths of 
the things which America holds to-day as precious 
she has inherited from Great Britain. It is time, 
therefore, she gave us something in return, and it 
is time also the British manufacturer should throw 
aside his reserve and his scoffing and be ready to 
learn. 

If the preceding chapters of " America at Work " 
teach anything, they teach that if success is to be 
attained in business, conservative ways must be 
abandoned. The British manufacturer has to learn 
that what has been good for twenty years will not 



SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 263 

necessarily be good for the next twenty. At the head 
of great concerns we must have not merely orna- 
mental directors, but men who have " gone through 
the mill " and have had experience in actual work. 
Working men must get scraped out of their minds 
the idea that the aim of employers is to grind them 
down to the last farthing in wage. Employers must 
recognise that it is by paying well and readily and 
being free with expressions of appreciation that the 
best in a workman is brought out. There will have 
to be a little less of the feeling of master and man, 
and a little more of the feeling of partners working 
together, and each man knowing that the best he 
is doing for the firm, the best he is also doing for 
himself. 

Young men will have to understand that Great 
Britain cannot continue to be great unless they take 
as much interest in their country's commerce as they 
do in county cricket. Older men, the heads of con- 
cerns, will have to realise that it is with young men 
possessing push, perseverance, ingenuity, and en- 
thusiasm that success in modern business lies, and 
not always with the greybeards, whose chief virtue 
may be that they have kept, and can keep, a steady 
keel. 

When once you get beneath the surface there is 
more soundness of character in the Briton than in 
the American. It is not, however, by talking about 
our good qualities that we tread the road to success. 
It is by finding out our weak points and putting 
those right. And there is one word — a word which 
I have frequently used in these pages, representing a 



264 AMERICA AT WORK. 

quality of which the Briton is not largely possessed, 
but with which the American is saturated — the word 
** Adaptiveness." And when the people of Great 
Britain realise what that word stands for there will 
be less talk about the loss of trade, less grumbling 
about increased cost of production, and a great deal 
more progress. 



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Picturesque Mediterranean, The. 
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Pigeons, Fulton's Book of. Edited 
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Planet, Tlie Story of Our. By Prof. 
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Playfair, Lyon, First Lord Playfair 
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Playthings and Parodies. By Barry 
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Pomona's Travels. By Frank 
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Lewis Wright. With 30 new 
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Lewis Wright. With Eight 
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guerite Bryant. 6s. 
Puritan's Wife, A, By Max Pem- 

berton. 6s. 
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t*DEAD Man's Rock. 
t»THE Splendid Spur. 
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town. 
"I Saw three Ships," and other Winter's 

Tales. 
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Queen's Empire, The. Containing 
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Railway Guides, OfBciaL With Illus- 
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Railway. 
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Refiner's Fire, The. By Mrs. E. 

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Rivers of Great Britain: Descriptive^ 

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Rogue's March, The. By E. W. 

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Volume. 7s. 6d, 



8 A Selection from Cassell ^ Company'' s Publications. 



Euskin, John : A Sketch of His Life, 
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H. Spielmann. ss. 
Saturday Journal, Cassell'a. Yearly 
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Scientific Truth, The Criterion of. 
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Sea, The Story of the. Edited by Q. 
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Sea Wolves, The. By Max Pem- 
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Sentimental Tommy. By J. M. 
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Shaftesbury, The Seventh Earl of, 
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Shakespeare,The Plays of. Edited by 
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Shakespeare, The England of. New 
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Shakspere, The Royal With 50 
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Shaw, Alfred, Cricketer: His Career 
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Ship of Stars, The. By A. T. 

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Soldier of the King, A. By Dora 
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Songs of Near and Far Away. By 

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1 



A Selection from Cassell & Company s Piihlications. 9 



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Bible BiograpWes. lUus. is.6d. each. 

The story of Moses and Joshua, By 

the Rev. J. Telford. 
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Rev. D. C. Tovey. 
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Bi'Dle Comnienta,iy. Edited by 
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Bible Commentary for English 
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Child's Life of Christ, The. With 
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MY Comfort in sorrow. By Hugh Mac- 
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MY Bible. By the Right Rev. W. Boyd 
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MY Father. By the Riglit Rev. Ashtoa 
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MY WORK FOR GOD. By the Ri^ht Rev. 
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MY Emotional Life. By the Rev. Prcb 
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MY Growth in Divine LiFa By the Rev. 
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MY Soul. By the Rev. P. B. Power, M.A. 

MY Herhaftbk. By the Very Rev. Dean 

Bickersteth. 
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MY Walk with God. By the \&iy Rev. 
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A Selection from Cassell &* Company* s Publications. 1 1 



Helps to Beliefl Helpful Manuals 
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MIRACLES; By the Rev. Brownlow Mait- 

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Holy Land and the Bible. A Book 
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Life of Clirist, The. By the Very 
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Life of Lives, The : Further Studies 
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Life and Work of the Redeemer. 

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Matin and Vesper Bells. Earlier 
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Methodism, Side Lights on the 
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England, A History of. By H. O. 
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French-English and English-French 
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A Selection from Cassell &* Company's Publications. 13 



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cation.) 

Readers, The "Modem School" 
GeographicaL [List on application.) 

Readers, The "Modern School." 
Illustrated. [List on application, ) 

Reckoning, Howard's Art of. By C. 
Frusher Howard. Paper covers, 
IS. ; cloth, 2s. New Edition. 5s. 

Round the Empire. By G. R. 
Parkin. Fully Illustrated, is. 6d. 

R. H. S. Curves. By Prof. R. H. 
Smith. A Set of 23 Scaled Tem- 
plates, with Pamphlet, los. 6d. 

Scholar's Companion to "Things 
New and Old." Five Books. 32 
pages, extra crown 8vo. 2d. each. 

Shakspere's Plays for School Use. 
7 Books. Illustrated. 6d. each. 

Spelling, A Complete Manual of. 
By J. D. MORELL, LL.D. Cloth, 
IS. Cheap Edition, 6d. 

Spending and Saving : A Primer of 
Thrift. By Alfred Pinhorn. is. 

Technical Manuals, Cassell's. Illus- 
trated throughout. Sixteen Books, 
from 2S. to 4s. 6d, [List on appli- 
cation.) 

Technical Educator, Cassell's. With 
Coloured Plates and Engravings. 
Complete in Six Volumes. 3s. 6d. 
each. 

Technology, Manuals of. Edited by 
Prof. Ayrton, F.R.S., and Rich- 
ard Wormell, D.Sc, M.A. 
Illustrated throughout. Seven Books 
from 3s. 6d. to 5s. each. [List on 
application. ) 

Things New and Old; or, Stories 
from English History. By H. O. 
Arnold - Forster, M.A. Illus- 
trated. 7 Books from gd. to is. 8d. 

Things New and Old, Scholar's Com- 
panion to. 5 Books. 2d. each. 

This World of Ours. By H. O 
Arnold - Forster, M.A. Illus- 
trated. Cheap Edition. 2S. 6d. 

Troubadour, The. Selections from 
English Verse. Edited and Anno- 
tated by Philip Gibbs. is. 6d. 

"Wild Flowers" Sheets, Cassell's. 
12 Sheets, each containing 10 ex- 
amples of familiar wild flowers, 
beautifully reproduced in colours 
and varnished, is. 6d. each. 



CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited, Ludgate Hill, Lond^. 



14 A Selection from Cassell &* Company's Publications, 



Books for Young People. 



Animal Land for Little People. By 
S. H. Hamer, Illustrated, is. 6d. 

Beneatli the Banner. Being Narra- 
tives of Noble Lives and Brave 
Deeds. By F. J. Cross. Illus- 
trated. Limp cloth, is. Cloth 
gilt, 2S. 

Beyond the Blue Mountains. By 
L. T. Meade. 55. 

Birds, Beasts and Fishes. By S. H. 
Hamer. With Four Coloured 
Plates and numerous Illustrations. 
IS. 6d. 

Bo-Peep. A Book for the Little Ones. 
With Original Stories and Verses. 
Illustrated with Full-page Coloiu-ed 
Plates, and numerous Pictures in 
Colour. Yearly Volume. Picture 
Boards, 2s. 6d. ; cloth, 3s. 6d. 

Good Morning ! Good Night ! By 
F. J. Cross. Illustrated. Limp 
cloth, IS. ; or cloth boards, gilt 
lettered, 2s. 

Heroes of Every-day Life. By Laura 
Lane. Illustrated. 2s. 6d. 

" Little Folks " Half- Yearly Volume. 

Containing 480 pages, with Six 
Full-page Coloured Plates, and 
numerous other Pictures printed in 
Colour. Picture Boards, 3s. 6d. 
Cloth gilt, gilt edges, ss. each. 

Little Mother Bunch. By Mrs. 
Molesworth. Illustrated. 23. 6d. 

Magic at Home. By Prof. Hoff- 
man. Illustrated. Cloth gilt, 
3s. 6d. 

Master Charlie. By C. S. Harri- 
son and S. H. Hamer. Illus- 
trated. Coloiured boards, is. 6d. 

Micky Magee's Menagerie ; or. 
Strange Animals and their 
Doings. By S. H. Hamer, With 
Eight Coloured Plates and other 
Illustrations by Harry B. Neil- 
&0N. IS. 6d. 



Notable Shipwrecks. Revised and 
Enlarged Ediiion. is. 

Peter Pipers Peepshow. By S. H. 

Hamer. With Illustrations by H. 
B. Neilson and Lewis Baumer. 
IS. 6d. 

Pleasant Work for Busy Fingers. 
By Maggie Browne, illustrated. 
2S. 6d. 

Strange Adventures In Dicky-bird 
Land. Stories told by Mother 
Birds to amuse their Chicks, 
and overheard by R. Kearton, 
F.Z.S. With Illustrations from 
Photographs taken direct from 
Nature by C. Kearton. Cloth, 
3s. 6d. Cloth gilt, gilt edges, 5s. 

The Ten Travellers. By S. H. 
Hamer. With Four Coloured 
Plates and numerous Illustrations 
by Harry B. Neilson. is. 6d. 

The Jungle School ; or, Dr. Jibber- 
Jabber Burchall's Academy. By 
S. H. Hamer. With Illustrations 
by H. B. Neilson. is. 6d. 

The New "Little Folks" Painting 
Book. Illustrated, is. 

" Tiny Tots " Annual Volume. 
Boards, is. 4d. Cloth, is. 6d. 

Topsy Turvy Tales. By S. H. 

Hamer. With Illustrations by 
Harry B. Neilson. is. 6d. 

Two Old Ladies, Two Foolish Fairies, 
and a Tom Cat. The Surpriiing 
Adventures of Tuppy and Tue. A 
New Fairy Story. By Maggie 
Browne. With Four Coloured 
Plates and other Illustrations. 
3s. 6d. 

Whys and Other Whys ; or. Curious 
Creatures and Their Tales. By 
i'. H. Hamer and Harry B, 
Neilson. Paper boards, as, 6d, 
Cloth, 3s. 6d. 



A Selection from Cassell &^ Company s Publications. 15 



CASSELL'S SHILLING STORY BOOKS. 

Interesting Stories. 
A Pair of Primroses. 
Frank's Life Battle. 
Ella's Golden Year. 
In the Days of King George. 
Little Queen Mar 

CASSELL'S EIGHTEENPENNY STORY BOOKS. Illustrated. 



All Illustrated, and containing 

Rhoda's Reward. 
The Heiress of Wyvern Court. 
Their Road to Fortune, 
Won by Gentleness. 



Aim at a Sure End. 
All in a Castle Fair. 
Bear and Forbear. 
By Land and Sea. 
Clare Linton's Friend. 
Dolly's Golden Slippers. 

BOOKS BY EDWARD S. ELLIS. 

Astray in the Forest. 
Bear Cavern. 

Red Feather. A Tale of the 
American Frontier. 



Her Wilful Way. 
Honour is My Guide. 
On Board the Esmeralda. 
The Bravest of the Brave. 
To School and Away. 



Illustrated. Cloth, is. 6d. each. 
Captured by Indians. 
The Boy Hunters of Kentucky. 
The Daughter of the Chieftain. 
Wolf Ear the Indian. 



CASSELL'S TWO-SHILLING STORY BOOKS. Illustrated 



Adam Hepburn's Vow. 
A Self-willed Family, 
Daisy's Dilemmas. 
Fairway Island. 
Fluffy and Jack. 
Little Folks' Sunday Book. 



The Lost Vestal. 
The Mystery of Master Max ; 
and the Shrimps of Shrimpton. 
Uncle Silvio's Secret. 
Wrong from the First. 



HALF-CROWN STORY BOOKS BY EDWARD S. ELLIS. Illustrated. Cloth. 

Pontiac, Chief of the Ottawas. 
Red Jacket: The Last of the 

Senecas. 
Scouts and Comrades. 
Shod with Silence. 
The Camp in the Mountains. 
The Great Cattle Trail. 
The Hunters of the Ozark. 
The Last War Trail. 
The Lost Trail. 
The Path in the Ravine. 
The Phantom of the River, 
The Rubber Hunters. 
The Young Ranchers. 
Two Boys in Wyoming, 
Uncrowning a King. 



A Strange Craft and its Won- 
derful Voyages. 

Blazing Arrow. 

Camp-Fire and Wigwam. 

Chieftain and Scout. 

Cowmen and Rustlers. 

Down the Mississippi. 

Footprints in the Forest. 

In Red Indian Trails. 

In the Days of the Pioneers. 

Iron Heart, War Chief of the 
Iroquois. 

Klondike Nuggets. 

Lost in the Wilds. 

Ned in the Block House. 

Ned in the Woods. 

Ned on the River. 

HALF-CROWN STORY BOOKS. 

An Old Boy's Yarns. 
At the South Pole. 
By Fire and Sword. 
Cost of a Mistake. 



Fairy Tales in Other Lands. 

Freedom's Sword, 

Heroes of the Indian Empire. 



1 6 A Selection from Cassell &* Company s Pub lie aitons. 



HALF-CROWN STORY BOOKS {continued) :— 



Lost Among White Africans. 

Lost on Du Corrig. 

Master of the Strong Hearts: 

A Story of Custer's Last 

Rally. 
Perils Afloat and Brigands 

Ashore. 
Pictures of School Life and 

Boyhood. 
Rogues of the Fiery Cross. 
Strong to Suffer. 



The Queen's Scarlet. 

The White House at Inch Gow. 

Through Trial to Triumph. 

Told Out of School. 

To Punish the Czar. 

To the Death. 

Wanted— A King ; or , How M erle 
Set the Nursery Rhymes to 
Rights. 

With Redskins on the War- 
path. 



BOOKS FOR THE LITTLE ONES. Fully Illustrated. 



Cassell's Robinson Crusoe. 
With loo Illustrations. Cloth, 
3S. 6d. ; gilt edges, 5s. 

Cassell's Swiss Family Robin- 
son. Illustrated. Cloth, 3s. 6d. ; 
gilt edges, 5s. 



The Old Fairy Tales. With 
Original Illustrations. Cloth, is. 

A Sunday Story Book. 3s. 6d, 
320 pages of Simple Stories, alter- 
nating with Pictures. 



THREE AND SIXPENNY STORY BOOKS FOR GIRLS. Illustrated. 



A Sweet Girl Grad-'] 

UATE. New 

Bashful Fifteen. Edition. 

Merry Girls of Eng- 
land. With 

Red Rose and Tiger 8 Col- 

LiLY. cured 

The Rebellion of Lil )■ Plates 

Carrington. in each. 

A World of Girls : The 

Story of a School. By 

Polly: A New-Fash- L. T. 

ioned Girl. Meade. 

The Palace Beauti- 

FUL. 



} 



By Mrs. 
Robson. 



A Girl without Am- 
bition. 
Mrs. Pederson's Niece. 

The King's Command; A Story 
for Girls. By Maggie Symington. 

Sisters Three, "j By Jessie Man- 

ToM AND Some j-sergh (Mrs.G.de 

Other Girls. J Home Vaizey). 

Bound by a Spell. By the Hon. 
Mrs. Greene. 

Five Stars in a Little Pool. 

By Edith Carrington. 



THREE AND SIXPENNY STORY BOOKS FOR BOYS. Illustrated. Cloth gilt 



Follow my Leader." 
hot Baines Reed. 



ByTal- 



FoR Fortune and Glory: A 
Story of the Soudan War. 
By Lewis Hough. 

For Glory and Renown. By 
D. H. Parry. 

The Capture of the "Es- 
trella": a Tale of the 
Slave Trade, By Commander 
Claud Harding, R.N. 



The Red Terror : A Story of the 
Paris Commune. By Edward King. 

The Three Homes. By the Very 
Rev. Dean Farrar. 

Under Bayard's Banner. By 
Henry Frith. 

Under the Great Bear. By 

Kirk Munroe. 
With Claymore and Bayonet. 

By Colonel Percy Groves. 



CASSELL & COMPANY'S COMPLETE CATALOGUE WILL BE SENT POST FREE ON APPLICATION TO 
CASSELL & COMPANY, Limited, La BtlU Sawagt^ Ludgatt Hiil, LemUm. 



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